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What Is Beauty?

Table of Contents

The concept of beauty is studied in sociology, philosophy, psychology, culture, and aesthetics.

It is regarded as a property of an object, idea, animal, place, or a person, and it often interpreted as balance and harmony with nature.

Beauty as a concept has been argued throughout the entire history of civilization, but even today, there is neither single definition accepted by many people nor shared vision.

People think that something or someone is beautiful when it gives them feelings of attraction, placidity, pleasure, and satisfaction, which may lead to emotional well-being.

If speaking about a beautiful person, he or she can be characterized by the combination of inner beauty (personality, elegance, integrity, grace, intelligence, etc.) and outer beauty or physical attractiveness.

The interpretation of beauty and its standards are highly subjective. They are based on changing cultural values.

Besides, people have unique personalities with different tastes and standards, so everyone has a different vision of what is beautiful and what is ugly.

We all know the saying that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

That’s why writing a beauty definition essay is not easy. In this article, we will explore this type of essay from different angles and provide you with an easy how-to writing guide.

Besides, you will find 20 interesting beauty essay topics and a short essay sample which tells about the beauty of nature.

What is beauty essay?

Let’s talk about the specifics of what is beauty philosophy essay.

As we have already mentioned, there is no single definition of this concept because its interpretation is based on constantly changing cultural values as well as the unique vision of every person.

…So if you have not been assigned a highly specific topic, you can talk about the subjective nature of this concept in the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder essay.”

Communicate your own ideas in “what does beauty mean to you essay,” tell about psychological aspects in the “inner beauty essay” or speak about aesthetic criteria of physical attractiveness in the “beauty is only skin deep essay.”

You can choose any approach you like because there are no incorrect ways to speak about this complex subjective concept.

How to write a beauty definition essay?

When you are writing at a college level, it’s crucial to approach your paper in the right way.

Keep reading to learn how to plan, structure, and write a perfect essay on this challenging topic.

You should start with a planning stage which will make the entire writing process faster and easier. There are different planning strategies, but it’s very important not to skip the essential stages.

• Analyzing the topic – break up the title to understand what is exactly required and how complex your response should be. Create a mind map, a diagram, or a list of ideas on the paper topic.
• Gathering resources – do research to find relevant material (journal and newspaper articles, books, websites). Create a list of specific keywords and use them for the online search. After completing the research stage, create another mind map and carefully write down quotes and other information which can help you answer the essay question.
• Outlining the argument – group the most significant points into 3 themes and formulate a strong specific thesis statement for your essay. Make a detailed paper plan, placing your ideas in a clear, logical order. Develop a structure, forming clear sections in the main body of your paper.

If you know exactly what points you are going to argue, you can write your introduction and conclusion first. But if you are unsure about the logical flow of the argument, it would be better to build an argument first and leave the introductory and concluding sections until last.

Stick to your plan but be ready to deviate from it as your work develops. Make sure that all adjustments are relevant before including them in the paper.

Keep in mind that the essay structure should be coherent.

In the introduction, you should move from general to specific.

• Start your essay with an attention grabber : a provocative question, a relevant quote, a story.
• Then introduce the topic and give some background information to provide a context for your subject.
• State the thesis statement and briefly outline all the main ideas of the paper.
• Your thesis should consist of the 2 parts which introduce the topic and state the point of your paper .

Body paragraphs act like constructing a block of your argument where your task is to persuade your readers to accept your point of view.

• You should stick to the points and provide your own opinion on the topic .
• The number of paragraphs depends on the number of key ideas.
• You need to develop a discussion to answer the research question and support the thesis .
• Begin each body paragraph with a topic sentence that communicates the main idea of the paragraph.
• Add supporting sentences to develop the main idea and provide appropriate examples to support and illustrate the point .
• Comment on the examples and analyze their significance .
• Use paraphrases and quotes with introductory phrases. They should be relevant to the point you are making.
• Finish every body paragraph with a concluding sentence that provides a transition to the next paragraph .
• Use transition words and phrases to help your audience follow your ideas .

In conclusion, which is the final part of your essay, you need to move from the specific to general.

• You may restate your thesis , give a brief summary of the key points, and finish with a broad statement about the future direction for research and possible implications.
• Don’t include any new information here.

When you have written the first draft, put it aside for a couple of days. Reread the draft and edit it by improving the content and logical flow, eliminating wordiness, and adding new examples if necessary to support your main points. Edit the draft several times until you are completely satisfied with it.

Finally, proofread the draft, fix spelling and grammar mistakes, and check all references and citations to avoid plagiarism. Review your instructions and make sure that your essay is formatted correctly.

Winning beauty essay topics

• Are beauty contests beneficial for young girls?
• Is it true that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder?
• Inner beauty vs physical beauty.
• History of beauty pageants.
• How can you explain the beauty of nature?
• The beauty of nature as a theme of art.
• The beauty of nature and romanticism.
• Concept of beauty in philosophy.
• Compare concepts of beauty in different cultures.
• Concept of beauty and fashion history.
• What is the aesthetic value of an object?
• How can beauty change and save the world?
• What is the ideal beauty?
• Explain the relationship between art and beauty.
• Can science be beautiful?
• What makes a person beautiful?
• The cult of beauty in ancient Greece.
• Rejection of beauty in postmodernism.
• Is beauty a good gift of God?
• Umberto Eco on the western idea of beauty.

The beauty of nature essay sample

The world around us is so beautiful that sometimes we can hardly believe it exists. The beauty of nature has always attracted people and inspired them to create amazing works of art and literature. It has a great impact on our senses, and we start feeling awe, wonder or amazement. The sight of flowers, rainbows, and butterflies fills human hearts with joy and a short walk amidst nature calms their minds. …Why is nature so beautiful? Speaking about people, we can classify them between beautiful and ugly. But we can’t say this about nature. You are unlikely to find an example in the natural world which we could call ugly. Everything is perfect – the shapes, the colors, the composition. It’s just a magic that nature never makes aesthetic mistakes and reveals its beauty in all places and at all times. Maybe we are psychologically programmed to consider natural things to be beautiful. We think that all aspects of nature are beautiful because they are alive. We see development and growth in all living things, and we consider them beautiful, comparing that movement with the static state of man-made things. Besides, maybe we experience the world around us as beautiful because we view it as an object of intellect and admire its rational structure. Nature has intrinsic value based on its intelligible structure. It’s an integral part of our lives, and it needs to be appreciated.

On balance…

We have discussed specifics of the “what is true beauty essay” and the effective writing strategies you should use to approach this type of academic paper. Now it’s time to practice writing.

You should write whenever you have a chance because practice makes perfect. If you feel you need more information about writing essays, check other articles on our website with useful tips and tricks.

Definition of beauty essay sample

11 simple steps to help you write a research paper on climate change

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“ What is Beauty? ” YouTube, uploaded by CNN, 16 Mar. 2018.

What is beauty?

In 2018 CNN made a brief video tracing how women’s beauty has been defined over time and how those perceptions of beauty “leave women in constant pursuit of the ideal.” How have perceptions of beauty changed over time? How do those definitions apply to things beyond women’s beauty? Rory Corbett addresses beauty from an interesting perspective in his essay, “What is Beauty?” in which he notes that, “beauty is not just a visual experience; it is a characteristic that provides a perceptual experience to the eye, the ear, the intellect, the aesthetic faculty, or the moral sense. It is the qualities that give pleasure, meaning or satisfaction to the senses, but in this talk I wish to concentrate on the eye, the intellect and the moral sense.” What does the author mean by “the moral sense”? How does Corbett’s essay expand your thinking of what beauty is?

Art and the Aesthetic Experience

Beauty is something we perceive and respond to. It may be a response of awe and amazement, wonder and joy, or something else. It might resemble a “peak experience” or an epiphany. It might happen while watching a sunset or taking in the view from a mountaintop, for example. This is a kind of experience, an aesthetic response that is a response to the thing’s representational qualities , whether it is man-made or natural (Silverman). The subfield of philosophy called aesthetics is devoted to the study and theory of this experience of the beautiful; in the field of psychology, aesthetics is studied in relation to the physiology and psychology of perception.

Aesthetic analysis is a careful investigation of the qualities which belong to objects and events that evoke an aesthetic response. The aesthetic response is the thoughts and feelings initiated because of the character of these qualities and the particular ways they are organized and experienced perceptually (Silverman).

The aesthetic experience that we get from the world at large is different than the art-based aesthetic experience. It is important to recognize that we are not saying that the natural wonder experience is bad or lesser than the art world experience; we are saying it is different. What is different is the constructed nature of the art experience. The art experience is a type of aesthetic experience that also includes aspects, content, and context of humanness. When something is made by a human, people know that there is some level of commonality and/or communal experience.

Why aesthetics is only the beginning in analyzing an artwork

We are also aware that beyond sensory and formal properties, all artwork is informed by its specific time and place or the specific historical and cultural milieu it was created in (Silverman). For this reason people analyze artwork through not only aesthetics, but also, historical and cultural contexts. Think about what you bring to the viewing of a work of art. What has influenced the lens through which you analyze beauty?

How we engage in aesthetic analysis

Often the feelings or thoughts evoked as a result of contemplating an artwork are initially based primarily upon what is actually seen in the work. The first aspects of the artwork we respond to are its sensory properties, its formal properties, and its technical properties (Silverman). Color is an example of a sensory property. Color is considered a kind of form and how form is arranged is a formal property. What medium (e.g., painting, animation, etc.) the artwork is made of is an example of a technical property. These will be discussed further in the next module. As Dr. Silverman, of California State University explains, the sequence of questions in an aesthetic analysis could be: what do we actually see? How is what is seen organized? And, what emotions and ideas are evoked as a result of what has been observed?

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

What has influenced the lens through which you analyze beauty?

Works Cited

Corbett, J Rory. “What Is Beauty?: Royal Victoria Hospital, Wednesday 1st October 2008.” The Ulster Medical Journal , U.S. National Library of Medicine, May 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2699193/ .

Ginsburg, Anna. “What Is Beauty? .” YouTube , CNN, 16 Mar. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5utnc_yspSo .

Silverman, Ronald. Learning About Art: A Multicultural Approach. California State University, 2001. Web. 24, June 2008.

“What is Beauty?” YouTube , uploaded by Merav Richter, 16 Mar. 2.

Susan Sontag on Beauty vs. Interestingness

By maria popova.

The essay was in part inspired by Pope John Paul II’s response to the news of countless cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: He summoned the American cardinals to the Vatican and attempted to rationalize the situation by stating that “a great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.” In this concerning assertion as a springboard for a broader reflection on our confused attitudes toward beauty, Sontag set out to transcend the common social definition of beauty as “a gladness of the senses” and instead “to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility.”

Sontag writes:

However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of “inner” (as opposed to “outer”) beauty. Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated—fixed—in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.

Arguing that beauty has ceased to be a sufficient standard for art, that “beautiful has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment,” Sontag notes:

The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

And yet there is more to beauty than a lackluster cultural abstraction:

Beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can’t say something is beautiful if you’re not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called “political correctness,” but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.)

Sontag traces the paradoxical and convoluted cultural trajectory of our relationship with beauty:

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and its appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with a social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude. What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as — on the contrary — excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refined judgment, high standards, fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical with oneself. The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty — and the caring about beauty — was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was “interesting.”

To call something “interesting,” however, isn’t always an admission of admiration. (For a crudely illustrative example, my eighth-grade English teacher memorably used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby.”) Turning to photography — perhaps the sharpest focus of Sontag’s cultural contemplation and prescient observation — she considers the complex interplay between interestingness and beauty:

[People] might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where “the interesting” first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and it soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.”

(Curiously, Francis Bacon famously asserted that “the best part of beauty [is that] which a picture cannot express.” )

What we tend to call interesting, Sontag argues, is that which “has not previously been thought beautiful (or good).” And yet the qualitative value of “interesting” is exponentially diminished with the word’s use and overuse — something entirely unsurprising and frequently seen with terms we come to apply too indiscriminately, until they lose their original meaning. (Contemporary case in point: “curation.” ) She writes, echoing her meditation on the creative purpose of boredom from nearly four decades earlier and her concept of “aesthetic consumerism” coined shortly thereafter:

The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring — understood as an absence, an emptiness — implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality. In order to enrich this deprived take on our experiences, one would have to acknowledge a full notion of boredom: depression, rage (suppressed despair). Then one could work toward a full notion of the interesting. But that quality of experience — of feeling — one would probably no longer even want to call interesting.

With her strong distaste for unnecessary polarities , Sontag observes:

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments.

She counters this with a more real, more living definition of beauty:

Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console… From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942: “The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.” Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.

Echoing young Virginia Woolf’s insight about nature, imitation, and the arts , Sontag elegantly brings her point full circle:

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent… Beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous. Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”

All the essays and speeches collected in At the Same Time are treasure troves of timeless wisdom on culture, art, politics, society, and the self. Complement them with Sontag on writing , boredom , sex , censorship , and aphorisms , her radical vision for remixing education , her insight on why lists appeal to us , and her illustrated meditations on art and on love .

— Published April 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/22/susan-sontag-on-beauty-vs-interestingness/ —

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The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is a sentence in a paper or essay (in the opening paragraph) that introduces the main topic to the reader. As one of the first things your reader sees, your thesis statement is one of the most important sentences in your entire paper—but also one of the hardest to write! 

In this article, we explain how to write a thesis statement in the best way possible. We look at what to include and the steps to take for writing your own, along with plenty of thesis statement examples to guide you. 

Here’s a tip: Want to make sure your writing shines? Grammarly can check your spelling and save you from grammar and punctuation mistakes. It even proofreads your text, so your work is polished wherever you write.

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Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, how to write a thesis statement: basics, what to include in a thesis statement (with examples), how to write a thesis statement in 3 steps.

The goal of a thesis statement is to let your reader know what your paper or essay is about. It helps your reader understand the greater context and scope of your topic, plus it lets your readers know what to expect from the rest of the work. 

A secondary benefit of a thesis statement is that it makes it easier to search for papers on a particular topic, especially in the realm of academic writing like research papers and thesis papers (which are sometimes known as dissertations when written for doctoral degrees). For example, if you’re writing a paper of your own, you’ll want to look up other papers to use as evidence and sources . You can simply scan the thesis statements of several papers to see which match your topic and could be worthwhile sources to cite. 

Before we get into details, here are the basic steps for how to write a thesis statement: 

• Develop the best topic to cover in your paper
• Phrase your topic as a question-and-answer
• Add some polish

We ’ ll describe each of those steps in more detail below, but we wanted to share a quick guide. Also, we ’ ll provide some thesis statement examples and talk about how to write a thesis statement for different kinds of essays: persuasive, compare-and-contrast, expository, and argumentative essays.

The thesis statement is located at the beginning of a paper, in the opening paragraph, making it an essential way to start an essay . A thesis statement isn’t necessarily the first sentence in an essay; typically you’ll want to hook the reader in an engaging way in the opening sentence before inserting your central idea or argument later in the first paragraph. A thesis statement is often confused with a topic sentence , the first sentence in a paragraph, because they both introduce the central idea of what follows. You can think of thesis statements as the topic sentence of your entire paper.  

Thesis statements are a necessary part of paper and essay writing , but different formats have different rules and best practices. Below, we break down how to write a thesis statement for the most common types of papers. 

How to write a thesis statement for expository and argumentative essays

Expository and argumentative essays are some of the most common types of academic papers. Because they don’t have a formal abstract like research papers, they rely on their thesis statements to provide an overview of what’s discussed. 

Thesis statements for argumentative and expository essays should use strong and decisive language; don’t be wishy-washy or uncertain. You want to take a stand right in the opening so that your readers understand what your paper is trying to show. 

Moreover, thesis statements for these essays should be specific, with some minor details to hint at the rest of the paper. It’s not enough to merely make your point; you also want to provide some basic evidence or background context to paint a full picture. 

If your paper dives into different subtopics or categories, try to fit them into the thesis statement if you can. You don’t have to get into details here, but it’s nice to mention the different sections at the top so that the reader knows what to expect. 

Thesis statement examples

Despite the taboo, insects make an excellent food source and could stem humanity’s looming food shortage, based on both their protein output and the sustainability of farming them. 

The backlash to rock ’n’ roll music in the ’50s by religious groups and traditionalists actually boosted the genre’s popularity instead of diminishing it as intended.

How to write a thesis statement for persuasive essays

Similar to argumentative essays, persuasive essays follow many of the same guidelines for their thesis statements: decisive language, specific details, and mentions of subtopics. 

However, the main difference is that, while the thesis statements for argumentative and expository essays state facts, the thesis statements for persuasive essays state clear opinions . Still, the format is the same, and the opinions are often treated like facts, including conclusive language and citing evidence to support your claims. 

Furthermore, unlike with other essays, it’s appropriate to make emotional connections in a thesis statement in persuasive essays. This can actually be a clever strategy to start your essay off on a more personal, impactful note. 

Advertising should not be allowed in public schools because it’s a distraction from studies and may lead to misguided priorities among the school board, to say nothing of the materialist culture it promotes. 

Exotic pets provide the same love and companionship as conventional pets, so the laws regulating which animals can and cannot be kept as pets should be more relaxed.

How to write a thesis statement for compare-and-contrast essays

Thesis statements for compare-and-contrast essays are tricky because you have at least two topics to touch on instead of just one. The same general guidelines apply (decisive language, details, etc.), but you need to give equal attention to both your topics—otherwise, your essay will seem biased from the start. 

As always, your thesis statement should reflect what’s written in the rest of your essay. If your essay spends more time comparing than contrasting, your thesis statement should focus more on similarities than differences. 

It sometimes helps to give specific examples as well, but keep them simple and brief. Save the finer details for the body of your essay. 

Sean Connery and Daniel Craig are the two most popular actors to portray James Bond, but both have their own distinct and at times contradictory interpretations of the character. 

Now that you know what you’re aiming for, it’s time to sit down and write your own thesis statement. To keep you on track, here are three easy steps to guide you. 

1 Brainstorm the best topic for your essay

You can’t write a thesis statement until you know what your paper is about, so your first step is choosing a topic. 

If the topic is already assigned, great ! That’s all for this step. If not, consider the tips below for choosing the topic that’s best for you:

• Pick a topic that you’re passionate about. Even if you don’t know much about it, it’ll be easier to learn about it while writing if you’re genuinely interested. 
• Narrow down your topic to something specific; otherwise, your paper will be too broad and perhaps too long. Just make sure it’s not too specific, or you won’t have enough to write about. Try to find a happy medium. 
• Check beforehand that there are enough strong, credible sources to use for research. You don’t want to run out of referential material halfway through. 

Once you’ve chosen a topic—and the angle or stance you want to take—then it’s time to put the idea for your thesis sentence into words. 

2 Phrase your topic as a question and then answer it

It’s not always easy to fit your entire thesis into just one sentence, let alone one that’s written clearly and eloquently. Here’s a quick technique to help you get started. 

First, phrase your topic as a question. For example, if you want to write about Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy, ask yourself, “What influences did Gandhi have on society after his death?” 

If you already know the answer, write it down—that’s a good start for your thesis statement. If you don’t know the answer, do some preliminary research to find out; you can certainly use what you discover as evidence and sources in your essay’s body paragraphs . 

3 Add some polish

Chances are, your first attempt at a thesis statement won’t be perfect. To get it to its best, try revising , editing , and adding what’s missing. 

Remember the core traits for thesis statements we mentioned above: decisive language, a happy medium of specific but not too specific details, and mention of subtopics. If you’re struggling to contain everything in a single sentence, feel free to move the secondary information to the following sentence. The thesis statement itself should only have what’s most necessary. 

If you’re in doubt, read your thesis statement to a friend and ask them what they think your paper is about. If they answer correctly, your thesis statement does its job. 

Next comes the hard part—writing the rest! While the bulk of the writing lies ahead, at least you’ve nailed down your central idea. To plot out your supporting argument, follow our advice on essay structure and let your ideas flow. 

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Beauty in Literature: A collection of works

Ideas on beauty and what it means to be beautiful have changed over the years and this evolution has been documented throughout literature.

This collection comprises high quality literary criticism from our literature journals exploring the concept of beauty. The articles in the collection investigate a broad range of literary works from the ancient classics through to the twentieth century, and use the latest in English studies to interrogate the nature of beauty.

The collection is free to read until the end of October 2020.

American Literary History

Classical receptions journal, essays in criticism, isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, journal of victorian culture, literary imagination, melus: multi-ethnic literature of the united states, notes & queries, shakespeare quarterly, the cambridge quarterly, the review of english studies, forgetting auschwitz: jonathan littell and the death of a beautiful woman, the princess among the polemicists: aesthetics and protest at midcentury, 'third cheerleader from the left': from homer's helen to helen of troy, poppies, scarlet flowers, 'this beauty': h.d.'s choruses from the iphigeneia in aulis and the first world war, a short course of the belles lettres for keatsians, general and invariable ideas of nature: joshua reynolds and his critical descendants, 'wonder' and 'beauty' in the awkward age, beauty and the victorian body, the fate of beauty, "the can is beautiful, the road is ugly": edward abbey, kab, and the environmental aesthetics of litter, ironic pastorals and beautiful swamps: w.e.b. du bois and the troubled landscapes of the american south, 'one single ivory cell': oscar wilde and the brain, beautiful pictures of the lost homeland, beautiful houses built of brick and stone..., toward the "uncommonly beautiful": queer-of-color youth and "delectable deformity" in rakesh satyal's blue boy, gold-digger: reading the marital and national romance in bharati mukherjee's jasmine, 'beauty is in the eye of the gazer': an aphorism in jane eyre, interpreting the person: tradition, conflict, and cymbeline's imogen, on the origins of beauty: aesthetics and method in the works of charles darwin, the review of english studies prize essay: the meaning of the 'sublime and beautiful': shaftesburian contexts and rhetorical issues in edmund burke's philosophical enquiry, 'she was a queen, and therefore beautfiul': sidney, his mother, and queen elizabeth, william gilpin at the coast: a new perspective on picturesque travel writing, affiliations.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Beauty

Introduction, anthologies and reference works.

• The Sensuous and Desire
• Beauty and Art
• Beauty and Disinterest
• Beauty and Nature
• Beauty Contested
• Beauty Experienced
• Beauty and Evaluation
• Beauty and Aesthetic Form
• Beauty and Autonomy
• Beauty and the Form of Perfection
• Aesthetic Judgement and Community
• Beauty and Truth
• Beauty and Value Theory
• Beauty and Morality
• Beauty Naturalized

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• Aesthetic Hedonism
• Analytic Approaches to Aesthetics
• Analytic Approaches to Pornography and Objectification
• Analytic Philosophy of Music
• Analytic Philosophy of Photography
• Art and Emotion
• Art and Morality
• Environmental Aesthetics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Aesthetics
• History of Aesthetics
• Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics and Teleology
• Ontology of Art
• Susanne Langer

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Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

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Beauty by Jennifer A. McMahon LAST REVIEWED: 26 April 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 31 July 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0038

Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found, and how it was to be included in a life were prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments―metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical―and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul that we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment that can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgement by which we exercise the social, comparative, and intersubjective elements of cognition, and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation between mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavors while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation, or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterizes beauty theory prior to the 20th century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. However, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary-inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics, and psychology. Although during the 20th century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning, and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. This work has been funded by an Australian Research Council Grant: DP150103143 (Taste and Community).

Anthologies on beauty that bring together writers who, while they may discuss art, do so in the main only to reveal our capacity for beauty, include the excellent selection of historical readings collected in the one-volume Hofstadter and Kuhns 1976 and the more culturally inclusive collection Cooper 1997 . Recent anthologies on beauty can take the form of a study of aesthetic value, such as in Schaper 1983 , or more specifically on the ethical dimension of aesthetic value, such as in Hagberg 2008 . Reference works in philosophical aesthetics today tend to focus on the philosophy of art and criticism. They typically include one chapter on beauty, and in this context Mothersill 2004 treats beauty as an evaluative category for art; and in keeping with this approach, Mothersill 2009 recommends a historically informed understanding of the concept beauty derived from Hegel. A recent trend toward environmental aesthetics brings us back to beauty as a property of the natural world, as in Zangwill 2003 , while McMahon 2005 responds to empirical trends by treating beauty as a value compatible with naturalization. The comprehensive entry “ Beauty ” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is divided into four parts. It begins with Stephen David Ross’s brief but excellent summary of the history of concepts that underpin beauty theory and philosophical aesthetics more broadly. It is followed by Nickolas Pappas’s dedicated section on classical concepts of beauty, and then Jan A. Aertsen’s section on medieval concepts of beauty. The entry concludes with Nicholas Riggle’s discussion of beauty and love, which introduces contemporary themes to the topic. Guyer 2014 analyzes historical trends in approaches to beauty theory in a way that sets up illuminating contrasts to contemporary perspectives.

“Beauty.” In Abhinavagupta–Byzantine Aesthetics . Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In the course of setting out the historical foundations to the concept beauty, we are provided with an excellent summary of the key concepts that still dominate or underpin philosophical aesthetics, including pleasure, desire, the good, disinterest, taste, value, and love. Available at Oxford Art Online by subscription.

Cooper, David. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings . Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Introductions are provided to some of the classic readings on beauty followed by an extract from the relevant work. They are discussed in terms of their relevance to understanding art rather than value more generally.

Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics . 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Guyer traces the development of key concepts in aesthetics, including beauty, within a context of broader scaled trends, such as aesthetics of truth in the ancient world, aesthetics of emotion and imagination in the 18th century, and aesthetics of meaning and significance in the 20th century.

Hagberg, Garry I., ed. Art and Ethical Criticism . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444302813

A series of papers on the ethical dimension of art, the authors draw out the ethical significance of a particular art/literary/musical work or art form. It is worth noting that the lead essay by Paul Guyer argues that 18th-century writers on beauty did not hold any concepts incompatible with this approach.

Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Well-chosen readings from classic works, with commentary provided, marred occasionally by the editors’ anachronistic emphasis on art. The readings provide a good introduction to various conceptions of beauty as a general value.

McMahon, Jennifer A. “Beauty.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 307–319. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

A historical overview drawing out the contrast between sensuous- and formal/value-oriented approaches to beauty, culminating in the contrast between Freud’s pleasure principle and the constructivist approach of cognitive science.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment: Remapping Aesthetics.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics . Edited by Peter Kivy, 152–166. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

DOI: 10.1002/9780470756645

Setting out the change in focus in philosophical aesthetics between the 19th and 20th century, Mothersill then proceeds to analyze beauty with a view to its significance for understanding aesthetic value in relation to art.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty.” In A Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper, 166–171. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Mothersill considers the contributions made by key historical figures before settling on Hegel’s historicism as providing the most helpful insight for the present context. Available online.

Schaper, Eva, ed. Pleasure, Preference and Value . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

A series of essays by prominent philosophers on the nature of aesthetic value, which are very useful as an introduction to the study of value theory, including essays on taste, pleasure, aesthetic interest, aesthetic realism, and aesthetic objectivity.

Zangwill, Nick. “Beauty.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics . Edited by Jerrold Levinson, 325–343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

An introduction to the tradition of analytic approaches to value theory, beauty is analyzed into its components and relationships, and its status considered in terms of subjectivity and objectivity.

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The Concept of the Aesthetic

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions particular to one or another of these designations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that we give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; whether to define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological or representational content; how best to understand the relation between aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. But questions of more general nature have lately arisen, and these have tended to have a skeptical cast: whether any use of ‘aesthetic’ may be explicated without appeal to some other; whether agreement respecting any use is sufficient to ground meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement; whether the term ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose that justifies its inclusion in the lexicon. The skepticism expressed by such general questions did not begin to take hold until the later part of the 20th century, and this fact prompts the question whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic is inherently problematic and it is only recently that we have managed to see that it is, or (b) the concept is fine and it is only recently that we have become muddled enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicating between these possibilities requires a vantage from which to take in both early and late theorizing on aesthetic matters.

1.1 Immediacy

1.2 disinterest, 2.1 aesthetic objects, 2.2 aesthetic judgment, 2.3 the aesthetic attitude, 2.4 aesthetic experience, 2.5.1 the aesthetic question, 2.5.2 the normative question, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the concept of taste.

The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Why the concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention during the 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: the eighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective to the rise of rationalism, particularly as applied to beauty, and to the rise of egoism, particularly as applied to virtue. Against rationalism about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste held the judgment of beauty to be immediate; against egoism about virtue, it held the pleasure of beauty to be disinterested.

Rationalism about beauty is the view that judgments of beauty are judgments of reason, i.e., that we judge things to be beautiful by reasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically involves inferring from principles or applying concepts. At the beginning of the 18th century, rationalism about beauty had achieved dominance on the continent, and was being pushed to new extremes by “les géomètres,” a group of literary theorists who aimed to bring to literary criticism the mathematical rigor that Descartes had brought to physics. As one such theorist put it:

The way to think about a literary problem is that pointed out by Descartes for problems of physical science. A critic who tries any other way is not worthy to be living in the present century. There is nothing better than mathematics as propaedeutic for literary criticism. (Terrasson 1715, Preface, 65; quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks 1957, 258)

It was against this, and against more moderate forms of rationalism about beauty, that mainly British philosophers working mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may call the immediacy thesis —is that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather “sense” that they are. Here is an early expression of the thesis, from Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music , which first appeared in 1719:

Do we ever reason, in order to know whether a ragoo be good or bad; and has it ever entered into any body’s head, after having settled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the qualities of each ingredient that enters into the composition of those messes, to examine into the proportion observed in their mixture, in order to decide whether it be good or bad? No, this is never practiced. We have a sense given us by nature to distinguish whether the cook acted according to the rules of his art. People taste the ragoo, and tho’ unacquainted with those rules, they are able to tell whether it be good or no. The same may be said in some respect of the productions of the mind, and of pictures made to please and move us. (Dubos 1748, vol. II, 238–239)

And here is a late expression, from Kant’s 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment :

If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful… . I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false … than allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste and not of the understanding of reason. (Kant 1790, 165)

But the theory of taste would not have enjoyed its eighteenth-century run, nor would it continue now to exert its influence, had it been without resources to counter an obvious rationalist objection. There is a wide difference—so goes the objection—between judging the excellence of a ragout and judging the excellence of a poem or a play. More often than not, poems and plays are objects of great complication. But taking in all that complication requires a lot of cognitive work, including the application of concepts and the drawing of inferences. Judging the beauty of poems and plays, then, is evidently not immediate and so evidently not a matter of taste.

The chief way of meeting this objection was first to distinguish between the act of grasping the object preparatory to judging it and the act of judging the object once grasped, and then to allow the former, but not the latter, to be as concept- and inference-mediated as any rationalist might wish. Here is Hume, with characteristic clarity:

[I]n order to pave the way for [a judgment of taste], and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained. Some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance command our affection and approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751, Section I)

Hume—like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, and Reid after him (Cooper 1711, 17, 231; Hutcheson 1725, 16–24; Reid 1785, 760–761)—regarded the faculty of taste as a kind of “internal sense.” Unlike the five “external” or “direct” senses, an “internal” (or “reflex” or “secondary”) sense is one that depends for its objects on the antecedent operation of some other mental faculty or faculties. Reid characterizes internal sense as follows:

Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it results. In this the internal sense differs from the external. Our external senses may discover qualities which do not depend upon any antecedent perception… . But it is impossible to perceive the beauty of an object, without perceiving the object, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760–761)

Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautiful objects, there will have to be a role for reason in their perception. But perceiving the nature or structure of an object is one thing. Perceiving its beauty is another.

Egoism about virtue is the view that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to serve some interest of yours. Its central instance is the Hobbesian view—still very much on early eighteenth-century minds—that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to promote your safety. Against Hobbesian egoism a number of British moralists—preeminently Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume—argued that, while a judgment of virtue is a matter of taking pleasure in response to an action or trait, the pleasure is disinterested, by which they meant that it is not self-interested (Cooper 1711, 220–223; Hutcheson 1725, 9, 25–26; Hume 1751, 218–232, 295–302). One argument went roughly as follows. That we judge virtue by means of an immediate sensation of pleasure means that judgments of virtue are judgments of taste, no less than judgments of beauty. But pleasure in the beautiful is not self-interested: we judge objects to be beautiful whether or not we believe them to serve our interests. But if pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested, there is no reason to think that pleasure in the virtuous cannot also be (Hutcheson 1725, 9–10).

The eighteenth-century view that judgments of virtue are judgments of taste highlights a difference between the eighteenth-century concept of taste and our concept of the aesthetic, since for us the concepts aesthetic and moral tend oppose one another such that a judgment’s falling under one typically precludes its falling under the other. Kant is chiefly responsible for introducing this difference. He brought the moral and the aesthetic into opposition by re-interpreting what we might call the disinterest thesis —the thesis that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested (though see Cooper 1711, 222 and Home 2005, 36–38 for anticipations of Kant’s re-interpretation).

According to Kant, to say that a pleasure is interested is not to say that it is self-interested in the Hobbesian sense, but rather that it stands in a certain relation to the faculty of desire. The pleasure involved in judging an action to be morally good is interested because such a judgment issues in a desire to bring the action into existence, i.e., to perform it. To judge an action to be morally good is to become aware that one has a duty to perform the action, and to become so aware is to gain a desire to perform it. By contrast, the pleasure involved in judging an object to be beautiful is disinterested because such a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in particular. If we can be said to have a duty with regard to beautiful things, it appears to be exhausted in our judging them aesthetically to be beautiful. That is what Kant means when he says that the judgment of taste is not practical but rather “merely contemplative” (Kant 1790, 95).

By thus re-orienting the notion of disinterest, Kant brought the concept of taste into opposition with the concept of morality, and so into line, more or less, with the present concept of the aesthetic. But if the Kantian concept of taste is continuous, more or less, with the present-day concept of the aesthetic, why the terminological discontinuity? Why have we come to prefer the term ‘aesthetic’ to the term ‘taste’? The not very interesting answer appears to be that we have preferred an adjective to a noun. The term ‘aesthetic’ derives from the Greek term for sensory perception, and so preserves the implication of immediacy carried by the term ‘taste.’ Kant employed both terms, though not equivalently: according to his usage, ‘aesthetic’ is broader, picking out a class of judgments that includes both the normative judgment of taste and the non-normative, though equally immediate, judgment of the agreeable. Though Kant was not the first modern to use ‘aesthetic’ (Baumgarten had used it as early as 1735), the term became widespread only, though quickly, after his employment of it in the third Critique. Yet the employment that became widespread was not exactly Kant’s, but a narrower one according to which ‘aesthetic’ simply functions as an adjective corresponding to the noun “taste.” So for example we find Coleridge, in 1821, expressing the wish that he “could find a more familiar word than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism,” before going on to argue:

As our language … contains no other useable adjective, to express coincidence of form, feeling, and intellect, that something, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses, becomes a new sense in itself … there is reason to hope, that the term aesthetic , will be brought into common use. (Coleridge 1821, 254)

The availability of an adjective corresponding to “taste” has allowed for the retiring of a series of awkward expressions: the expressions “judgment of taste,” “emotion of taste” and “quality of taste” have given way to the arguably less offensive ‘aesthetic judgment,’ ‘aesthetic emotion,’ and ‘aesthetic quality.’ However, as the noun ‘taste’ phased out, we became saddled with other perhaps equally awkward expressions, including the one that names this entry.

2. The Concept of the Aesthetic

Much of the history of more recent thinking about the concept of the aesthetic can be seen as the history of the development of the immediacy and disinterest theses.

Artistic formalism is the view that the artistically relevant properties of an artwork—the properties in virtue of which it is an artwork and in virtue of which it is a good or bad one—are formal merely, where formal properties are typically regarded as properties graspable by sight or by hearing merely. Artistic formalism has been taken to follow from both the immediacy and the disinterest theses (Binkley 1970, 266–267; Carroll 2001, 20–40). If you take the immediacy thesis to imply the artistic irrelevance of all properties whose grasping requires the use of reason, and you include representational properties in that class, then you are apt to think that the immediacy thesis implies artistic formalism. If you take the disinterest thesis to imply the artistic irrelevance of all properties capable of practical import, and you include representational properties in that class, then you are apt to think that the disinterest thesis implies artistic formalism.

This is not to suggest that the popularity enjoyed by artistic formalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries owed mainly to its inference from the immediacy or disinterest theses. The most influential advocates of formalism during this period were professional critics, and their formalism derived, at least in part, from the artistic developments with which they were concerned. As a critic Eduard Hanslick advocated for the pure music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and later Brahms, and against the dramatically impure music of Wagner; as a theorist he urged that music has no content but “tonally moving forms” (Hanslick 1986, 29). As a critic Clive Bell was an early champion of the post-Impressionists, especially Cezanne; as a theorist he maintained that the formal properties of painting—“relations and combinations of lines and colours”—alone have artistic relevance (Bell 1958, 17–18). As a critic Clement Greenberg was abstract expressionism’s ablest defender; as a theorist he held painting’s “proper area of competence” to be exhausted by flatness, pigment, and shape (Greenberg 1986, 86–87).

Not every influential defender of formalism has also been a professional critic. Monroe Beardsley, who arguably gave formalism its most sophisticated articulation, was not (Beardsley 1958). Nor is Nick Zangwill, who recently has mounted a spirited and resourceful defense of a moderate version of formalism (Zangwill 2001). But formalism has always been sufficiently motivated by art-critical data that once Arthur Danto made the case that the data no longer supported it, and perhaps never really had, formalism’s heyday came to an end. Inspired in particular by Warhol’s Brillo Boxes , which are (more or less) perceptually indistinguishable from the brand-printed cartons in which boxes of Brillo were delivered to supermarkets, Danto observed that for most any artwork it is possible to imagine both (a) another object that is perceptually indiscernible from it but which is not an artwork, and (b) another artwork that is perceptually indiscernible from it but which differs in artistic value. From these observations he concluded that form alone neither makes an artwork nor gives it whatever value it has (Danto 1981, 94–95; Danto 1986, 30–31; Danto 1997, 91).

But Danto has taken the possibility of such perceptual indiscernibles to show the limitations not merely of form but also of aesthetics, and he has done so on the grounds, apparently, that the formal and the aesthetic are co-extensive. Regarding a urinal Duchamp once exhibited and a perceptual indiscernible ordinary urinal, Danto maintains that

aesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art and the other not, since for all practical purposes they were aesthetically indiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one had to be beautiful, since they looked just alike. (Danto 2003, 7)

But the inference from the limits of the artistically formal to the limits of the artistically aesthetic is presumably only as strong as the inferences from the immediacy and disinterest theses to artistic formalism, and these are not beyond question. The inference from the disinterest thesis appears to go through only if you employ a stronger notion of disinterest than the one Kant understands himself to be employing: Kant, it is worth recalling, regards poetry as the highest of the fine arts precisely because of its capacity to employ representational content in the expression of what he calls ‘aesthetic ideas’ (Kant 1790, 191–194; see Costello 2008 and 2013 for extended treatment of the capacity of Kantian aesthetics to accommodate conceptual art). The inference from the immediacy thesis appears to go through only if you employ a notion of immediacy stronger than the one Hume, for example, takes himself to be defending when he claims (in a passage quoted in section1.1) that “in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment” (Hume 1751, 173). It may be that artistic formalism results if you push either of the tendencies embodied in the immediacy and disinterest theses to extremes. It may be that the history of aesthetics from the 18th century to the mid-Twentieth is largely the history of pushing those two tendencies to extremes. It does not follow that those tendencies must be so pushed.

Consider Warhol’s Brillo Boxes . Danto is right to maintain that the eighteenth-century theorist of taste would not know how to regard it as an artwork. But this is because the eighteenth-century theorist of taste lives in the 18th century, and so would be unable to situate that work in its twentieth-century art-historical context, and not because the kind of theory she holds forbids her from situating a work in its art-historical context. When Hume, for instance, observes that artists address their works to particular, historically-situated audiences, and that a critic therefore “must place herself in the same situation as the audience” to whom a work is addressed (Hume 1757, 239), he is allowing that artworks are cultural products, and that the properties that works have as the cultural products they are are among the “ingredients of the composition” that a critic must grasp if she is to feel the proper sentiment. Nor does there seem to be anything in the celebrated conceptuality of Brillo Boxes , nor of any other conceptual work, that ought to give the eighteenth-century theorist pause. Francis Hutcheson asserts that mathematical and scientific theorems are objects of taste (Hutcheson 1725, 36–41). Alexander Gerard asserts that scientific discoveries and philosophical theories are objects of taste (Gerard 1757, 6). Neither argues for his assertion. Both regard it as commonplace that objects of intellect may be objects of taste as readily as objects of sight and hearing may be. Why should the present-day aesthetic theorist think otherwise? If an object is conceptual in nature, grasping its nature will require intellectual work. If grasping an object’s conceptual nature requires situating it art-historically, then the intellectual work required to grasp its nature will include situating it art-historically. But—as Hume and Reid held (see section 1.1)—grasping the nature of an object preparatory to aesthetically judging it is one thing; aesthetically judging the object once grasped is another.

Though Danto has been the most influential and persistent critic of formalism, his criticisms are no more decisive than those advanced by Kendall Walton in his essay “Categories of Art.” Walton’s anti-formalist argument hinges on two main theses, one psychological and one philosophical. According to the psychological thesis, which aesthetic properties we perceive a work as having depends on which category we perceive the work as belonging to. Perceived as belonging to the category of painting, Picasso’s Guernica will be perceived as “violent, dynamic, vital, disturbing” (Walton 1970, 347). But perceived as belonging to the category of “guernicas”—where guernicas are works with “surfaces with the colors and shapes of Picasso’s Guernica , but the surfaces are molded to protrude from the wall like relief maps of different kinds of terrain”—Picasso’s Guernica will be perceived not as violent and dynamic, but as “cold, stark, lifeless, or serene and restful, or perhaps bland, dull, boring” (Walton 1970, 347). That Picasso’s Guernica can be perceived both as violent and dynamic and as not violent and not dynamic might be thought to imply that there is no fact of the matter whether it is violent and dynamic. But this implication holds only on the assumption that there is no fact of the matter which category Picasso’s Guernica actually belongs to, and this assumption appears to be false given that Picasso intended that Guernica be a painting and did not intend that it be a guernica, and that the category of paintings was well-established in the society in which Picasso painted it while the category of guernicas was not. Hence the philosophical thesis, according to which the aesthetic properties a work actually has are those it is perceived as having when perceived as belonging to the category (or categories) it actually belongs to. Since the properties of having been intended to be a painting and having been created in a society in which painting is well-established category are artistically relevant though not graspable merely by seeing (or hearing) the work, it seems that artistic formalism cannot be true. “I do not deny,” Walton concludes, “that paintings and sonatas are to be judged solely on what can be seen or heard in them—when they are perceived correctly. But examining a work with the senses can by itself reveal neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive it that way” (Walton 1970, 367).

But if we cannot judge which aesthetic properties paintings and sonatas have without consulting the intentions and the societies of the artists who created them, what of the aesthetic properties of natural items? With respect to them it may appear as if there is nothing to consult except the way they look and sound, so that an aesthetic formalism about nature must be true. Allen Carlson, a central figure in the burgeoning field of the aesthetics of nature, argues against this appearance. Carlson observes that Walton’s psychological thesis readily transfers from works of art to natural items: that we perceive Shetland ponies as cute and charming and Clydesdales as lumbering surely owes to our perceiving them as belonging to the category of horses (Carlson 1981, 19). He also maintains that the philosophical thesis transfers: whales actually have the aesthetic properties we perceive them as having when we perceive them as mammals, and do not actually have any contrasting aesthetic properties we might perceive them to have when we perceive them as fish. If we ask what determines which category or categories natural items actually belong to, the answer, according to Carlson, is their natural histories as discovered by natural science (Carlson 1981, 21–22). Inasmuch as a natural item’s natural history will tend not to be graspable by merely seeing or hearing it, formalism is no truer of natural items than it is of works of art.

The claim that Walton’s psychological thesis transfers to natural items has been widely accepted (and was in fact anticipated, as Carlson acknowledges, by Ronald Hepburn (Hepburn 1966 and 1968)). The claim that Walton’s philosophical thesis transfers to natural items has proven more controversial. Carlson is surely right that aesthetic judgments about natural items are prone to be mistaken insofar as they result from perceptions of those items as belonging to categories to which they do not belong, and, insofar as determining which categories natural items actually belong to requires scientific investigation, this point seems sufficient to undercut the plausibility of any very strong formalism about nature (see Carlson 1979 for independent objections against such formalism). Carlson, however, also wishes to establish that aesthetic judgments about natural items have whatever objectivity aesthetic judgments about works of art do, and it is controversial whether Walton’s philosophical claim transfers sufficiently to support such a claim. One difficulty, raised by Malcolm Budd (Budd 2002 and 2003) and Robert Stecker (Stecker1997c), is that since there are many categories in which a given natural item may correctly be perceived, it is unclear which correct category is the one in which the item is perceived as having the aesthetic properties it actually has. Perceived as belonging to the category of Shetland ponies, a large Shetland pony may be perceived as lumbering; perceived as belonging to the category of horses, the same pony may be perceived as cute and charming but certainly not lumbering. If the Shetland pony were a work of art, we might appeal to the intentions (or society) of its creator to determine which correct category is the one that fixes its aesthetic character. But as natural items are not human creations they can give us no basis for deciding between equally correct but aesthetically contrasting categorizations. It follows, according to Budd, “the aesthetic appreciation of nature is endowed with a freedom denied to the appreciation of art” (Budd 2003, 34), though this is perhaps merely another way of saying that the aesthetic appreciation of art is endowed with an objectivity denied to the appreciation of nature.

The eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of taste (or sentimentalists) was primarily a debate over the immediacy thesis, i.e., over whether we judge objects to be beautiful by applying principles of beauty to them. It was not primarily a debate over the existence of principles of beauty, a matter over which theorists of taste might disagree. Kant denied that there are any such principles (Kant 1790, 101), but both Hutcheson and Hume affirmed their existence: they maintained that although judgments of beauty are judgments of taste and not of reason, taste nevertheless operates according to general principles, which might be discovered through empirical investigation (Hutcheson 1725, 28–35; Hume 1757, 231–233).

It is tempting to think of recent debate in aesthetics between particularists and generalists as a revival of the eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of taste. But the accuracy of this thought is difficult to gauge. One reason is that it is often unclear whether particularists and generalists take themselves merely to be debating the existence of aesthetic principles or to be debating their employment in aesthetic judgment. Another is that, to the degree particularists and generalists take themselves to be debating the employment of aesthetic principles in aesthetic judgment, it is hard to know what they can be meaning by ‘aesthetic judgment.’ If ‘aesthetic’ still carries its eighteenth-century implication of immediacy, then the question under debate is whether judgment that is immediate is immediate. If ‘aesthetic’ no longer carries that implication, then it is hard to know what question is under debate because it is hard to know what aesthetic judgment could be. It may be tempting to think that we can simply re-define ‘aesthetic judgment’ such that it refers to any judgment in which an aesthetic property is predicated of an object. But this requires being able to say what an aesthetic property is without reference to its being immediately graspable, something no one seems to have done. It may seem that we can simply re-define ‘aesthetic judgment’ such that it refers to any judgment in which any property of the class exemplified by beauty is predicated of an object. But which class is this? The classes exemplified by beauty are presumably endless, and the difficulty is to specify the relevant class without reference to the immediate graspability of its members, and that is what no one seems to have done.

However we are to sort out the particularist/generalist debate, important contributions to it include, on the side of particularism, Arnold Isenberg’s “Critical Communication” (1949) Frank Sibley’s “Aesthetic Concepts” (in Sibley 2001) and Mary Mothersill’s Beauty Restored (1984) and, on the side of generalism, Monroe Beardsley’s Aesthetics (1958) and “On the Generality of Critical Reasons” (1962), Sibley’s “General Reasons and Criteria in Aesthetics” (in Sibley 2001), George Dickie’s Evaluating Art (1987), Stephen Davies’s “Replies to Arguments Suggesting that Critics’ Strong Evaluations Could not be Soundly Deduced” (1995), and John Bender’s “General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: The Generalist/Particularist Dispute” (1995). Of these, the papers by Isenberg and Sibley have arguably enjoyed the greatest influence.

Isenberg concedes that we often appeal to descriptive features of works in support of our judgments of their value, and he allows that this may make it seem as if we must be appealing to principles in making those judgments. If in support of a favorable judgment of some painting a critic appeals to the wavelike contour formed by the figures clustered in its foreground, it may seem as if his judgment must involve tacit appeal to the principle that any painting having such a contour is so much the better. But Isenberg argues that this cannot be, since no one agrees to any such principle:

There is not in all the world’s criticism a single purely descriptive statement concerning which one is prepared to say beforehand, ‘If it is true, I shall like that work so much the better’ (Isenberg 1949, 338).

But if in appealing to the descriptive features of a work we are not acknowledging tacit appeals to principles linking those features to aesthetic value, what are we doing? Isenberg believes we are offering “directions for perceiving” the work, i.e., by singling out certain its features, we are “narrow[ing] down the field of possible visual orientations” and thereby guiding others in “the discrimination of details, the organization of parts, the grouping of discrete objects into patterns” (Isenberg 1949, 336). In this way we get others to see what we have seen, rather than getting them to infer what we have inferred.

That Sibley advances a variety of particularism in one paper and a variety of generalism in another will give the appearance of inconsistency where there is none: Sibley is a particularist of one sort, and with respect to one distinction, and a generalist of another sort with respect to another distinction. Isenberg, as noted, is a particularist with respect to the distinction between descriptions and verdicts, i.e., he maintains that there are no principles by which we may infer from value-neutral descriptions of works to judgments of their overall value. Sibley’s particularism and generalism, by contrast, both have to do with judgments falling in between descriptions and verdicts. With respect to a distinction between descriptions and a set of judgments intermediate between descriptions and verdicts, Sibley is straightforwardly particularist. With respect to a distinction between a set of judgments intermediate between descriptions and verdicts and verdicts, Sibley is a kind of generalist and describes himself as such.

Sibley’s generalism, as set forth in “General Reasons and Criteria in Aesthetics,” begins with the observation that the properties to which we appeal in justification of favorable verdicts are not all descriptive or value-neutral. We also appeal to properties that are inherently positive, such as grace, balance, dramatic intensity, or comicality. To say that a property is inherently positive is not to say that any work having it is so much the better, but rather that its tout court attribution implies value. So although a work may be made worse on account of its comical elements, the simple claim that a work is good because comical is intelligible in a way that the simple claims that a work is good because yellow, or because it lasts twelve minutes, or because it contains many puns, are not. But if the simple claim that a work is good because comical is thus intelligible, comicality is a general criterion for aesthetic value, and the principle that articulates that generality is true. But none of this casts any doubt on the immediacy thesis, as Sibley himself observes:

I have argued elsewhere that there are no sure-fire rules by which, referring to the neutral and non-aesthetic qualities of things, one can infer that something is balanced, tragic, comic, joyous, and so on. One has to look and see. Here, equally, at a different level, I am saying that there are no sure-fire mechanical rules or procedures for deciding which qualities are actual defects in the work; one has to judge for oneself. (Sibley 2001, 107–108)

The “elsewhere” referred to in the first sentence is Sibley’s earlier paper, “Aesthetic Concepts,” which argues that the application of concepts such as ‘balanced,’ ‘tragic,’ ‘comic,’ or ‘joyous’ is not a matter of determining whether the descriptive (i.e., non-aesthetic) conditions for their application are met, but is rather a matter of taste. Hence aesthetic judgments are immediate in something like the way that judgments of color, or of flavor, are:

We see that a book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea is sweet by tasting it. So too, it might be said, we just see (or fail to see) that things are delicate, balanced, and the like. This kind of comparison between the exercise of taste and the use of the five senses is indeed familiar; our use of the word ‘taste’ itself shows that the comparison is age-old and very natural (Sibley 2001, 13–14).

But Sibley recognizes—as his eighteenth-century forebears did and his formalist contemporaries did not—that important differences remain between the exercise of taste and the use of the five senses. Central among these is that we offer reasons, or something like them, in support of our aesthetic judgments: by talking—in particular, by appealing to the descriptive properties on which the aesthetic properties depend—we justify aesthetic judgments by bringing others to see what we have seen (Sibley 2001, 14–19).

It is unclear to what degree Sibley, beyond seeking to establish that the application of aesthetic concepts is not condition-governed, seeks also to define the term ‘aesthetic’ in terms of their not being so. It is clearer, perhaps, that he does not succeed in defining the term this way, whatever his intentions. Aesthetic concepts are not alone in being non-condition-governed, as Sibley himself recognizes in comparing them with color concepts. But there is also no reason to think them alone in being non-condition-governed while also being reason-supportable, since moral concepts, to give one example, at least arguably also have both these features. Isolating the aesthetic requires something more than immediacy, as Kant saw. It requires something like the Kantian notion of disinterest, or at least something to play the role played by that notion in Kant’s theory.

Given the degree to which Kant and Hume continue to influence thinking about aesthetic judgment (or critical judgment, more broadly), given the degree to which Sibley and Isenberg continue to abet that influence, it is not surprising that the immediacy thesis is now very widely received. The thesis, however, has come under attack, notably by Davies (1990) and Bender (1995). (See also Carroll (2009), who follows closely after Davies (1990), and Dorsch (2013) for further discussion.)

Isenberg, it will be recalled, maintains that if the critic is arguing for her verdict, her argumentation must go something as follows:

• Artworks having p are better for having p .
• W is an artwork having p .
• Therefore, W is so much the better for having p .

Since the critical principle expressed in premise 1 is open to counter-example, no matter what property we substitute for p, Isenberg concludes that we cannot plausibly interpret the critic as arguing for her verdict. Rather than defend the principle expressed in premise 1, Davies and Bender both posit alternative principles, consistent with the fact that no property is good-making in all artworks, which they ascribe to the critic. Davies proposes that we interpret the critic as arguing deductively from principles relativized to artistic type, that is, from principles holding that artworks of a specific types or categories—Italian Renaissance paintings, romantic symphonies, Hollywood Westerns, etc.—having p are better for having it (Davies 1990, 174). Bender proposes that we interpret the critic as arguing inductively from principles expressing mere tendencies that hold between certain properties and artworks—principles, in other words, holding that artworks having p tend to be better for having it (Bender 1995, 386).

Each proposal has its own weaknesses and strengths. A problem with Bender’s approach is that critics do not seem to couch their verdicts in probabilistic terms. Were a critic to say that a work is likely to be good, or almost certainly good, or even that she has the highest confidence that it must be good, her language would suggest that she had not herself experienced the work, perhaps that she had judged the work on the basis of someone else’s testimony, hence that she is no critic at all. We would therefore have good reason to prefer Davies’s deductive approach if only we had good reason for thinking that relativizing critical principles to artistic type removed the original threat of counterexample. Though it is clear that such relativizing reduces the relative number of counterexamples, we need good reason for thinking that it reduces that number to zero, and Davies provides no such reason. Bender’s inductive approach, by contrast, cannot be refuted by counterexample, but only by counter-tendency.

If the critic argues from the truth of a principle to the truth of a verdict—as Davies and Bender both contend—it must be possible for her to establish the truth of the principle before establishing the truth of the verdict. How might she do this? It seems unlikely that mere reflection on the nature of art, or on the natures of types of art, could yield up the relevant lists of good- and bad-making properties. At least the literature has yet to produce a promising account as to how this might be done. Observation therefore seems the most promising answer. To say that the critic establishes the truth of critical principles on the basis of observation, however, is to say that she establishes a correlation between certain artworks she has already established to be good and certain properties she has already established those works to have. But then any capacity to establish that works are good by inference from principles evidently depends on some capacity to establish that works are good without any such inference, and the question arises why the critic should prefer to do by inference what she can do perfectly well without. The answer cannot be that judging by inference from principle yields epistemically better results, since a principle based on observations can be no more epistemically sound than the observations on which it is based.

None of this shows that aesthetic or critical judgment could never be inferred from principles. It does however suggest that such judgment is first and foremost non-inferential, which is what the immediacy thesis holds.

The Kantian notion of disinterest has its most direct recent descendents in the aesthetic-attitude theories that flourished from the early to mid 20th century. Though Kant followed the British in applying the term ‘disinterested’ strictly to pleasures, its migration to attitudes is not difficult to explain. For Kant the pleasure involved in a judgment of taste is disinterested because such a judgment does not issue in a motive to do anything in particular. For this reason Kant refers to the judgment of taste as contemplative rather than practical (Kant 1790, 95). But if the judgment of taste is not practical, then the attitude we bear toward its object is presumably also not practical: when we judge an object aesthetically we are unconcerned with whether and how it may further our practical aims. Hence it is natural to speak of our attitude toward the object as disinterested.

To say, however, that the migration of disinterest from pleasures to attitudes is natural is not to say that it is inconsequential. Consider the difference between Kant’s aesthetic theory, the last great theory of taste, and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, the first great aesthetic-attitude theory. Whereas for Kant disinterested pleasure is the means by which we discover things to bear aesthetic value, for Schopenhauer disinterested attention (or “will-less contemplation”) is itself the locus of aesthetic value. According to Schopenhauer, we lead our ordinary, practical lives in a kind of bondage to our own desires (Schopenhauer 1819, 196). This bondage is a source not merely of pain but also of cognitive distortion in that it restricts our attention to those aspects of things relevant to the fulfilling or thwarting of our desires. Aesthetic contemplation, being will-less, is therefore both epistemically and hedonically valuable, allowing us a desire-free glimpse into the essences of things as well as a respite from desire-induced pain:

When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thralldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will … Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us … comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us. (Schopenhauer 1819, 196)

The two most influential aesthetic-attitude theories of the 20th century are those of Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz. According to Stolnitz’s theory, which is the more straightforward of the two, bearing an aesthetic attitude toward an object is a matter of attending to it disinterestedly and sympathetically, where to attend to it disinterestedly is to attend to it with no purpose beyond that of attending to it, and to attend to it sympathetically is to “accept it on its own terms,” allowing it, and not one’s own preconceptions, to guide one’s attention of it (Stolnitz 1960, 32–36). The result of such attention is a comparatively richer experience of the object, i.e., an experience taking in comparatively many of the object’s features. Whereas a practical attitude limits and fragments the object of our experience, allowing us to “see only those of its features which are relevant to our purposes,…. By contrast, the aesthetic attitude ‘isolates’ the object and focuses upon it—the ‘look’ of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colors in the painting.” (Stolnitz 1960, 33, 35).

Bullough, who prefers to speak of “psychical distance” rather than disinterest, characterizes aesthetic appreciation as something achieved

by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our actual practical self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends—in short, by looking at it ‘objectively’ … by permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the ‘objective features of the experience, and by interpreting even our ‘subjective’ affections not as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon. (Bullough 1995, 298–299; emphasis in original).

Bullough has been criticized for claiming that aesthetic appreciation requires dispassionate detachment:

Bullough’s characterization of the aesthetic attitude is the easiest to attack. When we cry at a tragedy, jump in fear at a horror movie, or lose ourselves in the plot of a complex novel, we cannot be said to be detached, although we may be appreciating the aesthetic qualities of these works to the fullest… . And we can appreciate the aesthetic properties of the fog or storm while fearing the dangers they present. (Goldman 2005, 264)

But such a criticism seems to overlook a subtlety of Bullough’s view. While Bullough does hold that aesthetic appreciation requires distance “between our own self and its affections” (Bullough 1995, 298), he does not take this to require that we not undergo affections but quite the opposite: only if we undergo affections have we affections from which to be distanced. So, for example, the properly distanced spectator of a well-constructed tragedy is not the “over-distanced” spectator who feels no pity or fear, nor the “under-distanced” spectator who feels pity and fear as she would to an actual, present catastrophe, but the spectator who interprets the pity and fear she feels “not as modes of [her] being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon” (Bullough 1995, 299). The properly distanced spectator of a tragedy, we might say, understands her fear and pity to be part of what tragedy is about.

The notion of the aesthetic attitude has been attacked from all corners and has very few remaining sympathizers. George Dickie is widely regarded as having delivered the decisive blow in his essay “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (Dickie 1964) by arguing that all purported examples of interested attention are really just examples of inattention. So consider the case of the spectator at a performance of Othello who becomes increasingly suspicious of his own wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the impresario who sits gauging the size of the audience, or the case of the father who sits taking pride in his daughter’s performance, or the case of the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the play is apt to produce in its audience. These and all such cases will be regarded by the attitude theorist as cases of interested attention to the performance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattention to the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, the impresario to the till, the father to his daughter, the moralist to the effects of the play. But if none of them is attending to the performance, then none of them is attending to it interestedly (Dickie 1964, 57–59).

The attitude theorist, however, can plausibly resist Dickie’s interpretation of such examples. Clearly the impresario is not attending to the performance, but there is no reason to regard the attitude theorist as committed to thinking otherwise. As for the others, it might be argued that they are all attending. The jealous husband must be attending to the performance, since it is the action of the play, as presented by the performance, that is making him suspicious. The proud father must be attending to the performance, since he is attending to his daughter’s performance, which is an element of it. The moralist must be attending to the performance, since he otherwise would have no basis by which to gauge its moral effects on the audience. It may be that none of these spectators is giving the performance the attention it demands, but that is precisely the attitude theorist’s point.

But perhaps another of Dickie’s criticisms, one lesser known, ultimately poses a greater threat to the ambitions of the attitude theorist. Stolnitz, it will be recalled, distinguishes between disinterested and interested attention according to the purpose governing the attention: to attend disinterestedly is to attend with no purpose beyond that of attending; to attend interestedly is to attend with some purpose beyond that of attending. But Dickie objects that a difference in purpose does not imply a difference in attention:

Suppose Jones listens to a piece of music for the purpose of being able to analyze and describe it on an examination the next day and Smith listens to the same music with no such ulterior purpose. There is certainly a difference in the motives and intentions of the two men: Jones has an ulterior purpose and Smith does not, but this does not mean Jones’s listening differs from Smith’s … . There is only one way to listen to (to attend to) music, although there may be a variety of motives, intentions, and reasons for doing so and a variety of ways of being distracted from the music. (Dickie 1964, 58).

There is again much here that the attitude theorist can resist. The idea that listening is a species of attending can be resisted: the question at hand, strictly speaking, is not whether Jones and Smith listen to the music in the same way, but whether they attend in the same way to the music they are listening to. The contention that Jones and Smith are attending in the same way appears to be question-begging, as it evidently depends on a principle of individuation that the attitude theorist rejects: if Jones’s attention is governed by some ulterior purpose and Smith’s is not, and we individuate attention according to the purpose that governs it, their attention is not the same. Finally, even if we reject the attitude theorist’s principle of individuation, the claim that there is but one way to attend to music is doubtful: one can seemingly attend to music in myriad ways—as historical document, as cultural artifact, as aural wallpaper, as sonic disturbance—depending on which of the music’s features one attends to in listening to it. But Dickie is nevertheless onto something crucial to the degree he urges that a difference in purpose need not imply a relevant difference in attention. Disinterest plausibly figures in the definition of the aesthetic attitude only to the degree that it, and it alone, focuses attention on the features of the object that matter aesthetically. The possibility that there are interests that focus attention on just those same features implies that disinterest has no place in such a definition, which in turn implies that neither it nor the notion of the aesthetic attitude is likely to be of any use in fixing the meaning of the term ‘aesthetic.’ If to take the aesthetic attitude toward an object simply is to attend to its aesthetically relevant properties, whether the attention is interested or disinterested, then determining whether an attitude is aesthetic apparently requires first determining which properties are the aesthetically relevant ones. And this task seems always to result either in claims about the immediate graspability of aesthetic properties, which are arguably insufficient to the task, or in claims about the essentially formal nature of aesthetic properties, which are arguably groundless.

But that the notions of disinterest and psychical distance prove unhelpful in fixing the meaning of the term ‘aesthetic’ does not imply that they are mythic. At times we seem unable to get by without them. Consider the case of The Fall of Miletus —a tragedy written by the Greek dramatist Phrynicus and staged in Athens barely two years after the violent Persian capture of the Greek city of Miletus in 494 BC. Herodotus records that

[the Athenians] found many ways to express their sorrow at the fall of Miletus, and in particular, when Phrynicus composed and produced a play called The Fall of Miletus , the audience burst into tears and fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a disaster that was so close to home; future productions of the play were also banned. (Herodotus, The Histories , 359)

How are we to explain the Athenian reaction to this play without recourse to something like interest or lack of distance? How, in particular, are we to explain the difference between the sorrow elicited by a successful tragedy and the sorrow elicited in this case? The distinction between attention and inattention is of no use here. The difference is not that the Athenians could not attend to The Fall whereas they could attend to other plays. The difference is that they could not attend to The Fall as they could attend to other plays, and this because of their too intimate connection to what attending to The Fall required their attending to.

Theories of aesthetic experience may be divided into two kinds according to the kind of feature appealed to in explanation of what makes experience aesthetic: internalist theories appeal to features internal to experience, typically to phenomenological features, whereas externalist theories appeal to features external to the experience, typically to features of the object experienced. (The distinction between internalist and externalist theories of aesthetic experience is similar, though not identical, to the distinction between phenomenal and epistemic conceptions of aesthetic experience drawn by Gary Iseminger (Iseminger 2003, 100, and Iseminger 2004, 27, 36)). Though internalist theories—particularly John Dewey’s (1934) and Monroe Beardsley’s (1958)—predominated during the early and middle parts of the 20th century, externalist theories—including Beardsley’s (1982) and George Dickie’s (1988)—have been in the ascendance since. Beardsley’s views on aesthetic experience make a strong claim on our attention, given that Beardsley might be said to have authored the culminating internalist theory as well as the founding externalist one. Dickie’s criticisms of Beardsley’s internalism make an equally strong claim, since they moved Beardsley—and with him most everyone else—from internalism toward externalism.

According to the version of internalism Beardsley advances in his  Aesthetics  (1958), all aesthetic experiences have in common three or four (depending on how you count) features, which “some writers have [discovered] through acute introspection, and which each of us can test in his own experience” (Beardsley 1958, 527). These are focus (“an aesthetic experience is one in which attention is firmly fixed upon [its object]”), intensity, and unity, where unity is a matter of coherence and of completeness (Beardsley 1958, 527). Coherence, in turn, is a matter of having elements that are properly connected one to another such that

[o]ne thing leads to another; continuity of development, without gaps or dead spaces, a sense of overall providential pattern of guidance, an orderly cumulation of energy toward a climax, are present to an unusual degree. (Beardsley 1958, 528)

Completeness, by contrast, is a matter having elements that “counterbalance” or “resolve” one another such that the whole stands apart from elements without it:

The impulses and expectations aroused by elements within the experience are felt to be counterbalanced or resolved by other elements within the experience, so that some degree of equilibrium or finality is achieved and enjoyed. The experience detaches itself, and even insulates itself, from the intrusion of alien elements. (Beardsley 1958, 528)

Dickie’s most consequential criticism of Beardsley’s theory is that Beardsley, in describing the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, has failed to distinguish between the features we experience aesthetic objects as having and the features aesthetic experiences themselves have. So while every feature mentioned in Beardsley’s description of the coherence of aesthetic experience—continuity of development, the absence of gaps, the mounting of energy toward a climax—surely is a feature we experience aesthetic objects as having, there is no reason to think of aesthetic experience itself as having any such features:

Note that everything referred to [in Beardsley’s description of coherence] is a perceptual characteristic … and not an effect of perceptual characteristics. Thus, no ground is furnished for concluding that experience can be unified in the sense of being coherent. What is actually argued for is that aesthetic objects are coherent, a conclusion which must be granted, but not the one which is relevant. (Dickie 1965, 131)

Dickie raises a similar worry about Beardsley’s description of the completeness of aesthetic experience:

One can speak of elements being counterbalanced  in the painting  and say that the painting is stable, balanced and so on, but what does it mean to say the  experience  of the spectator of the painting is stable or balanced? … Looking at a painting in some cases might aid some persons in coming to feel stable because it might distract them from whatever is unsettling them, but such cases are atypical of aesthetic appreciation and not relevant to aesthetic theory. Aren’t characteristics attributable to the painting simply being mistakenly shifted to the spectator? (Dickie 1965, 132)

Though these objections turned out to be only the beginning of the debate between Dickie and Beardsley on the nature of aesthetic experience (See Beardsley 1969, Dickie 1974, Beardsley 1970, and Dickie 1987; see also Iseminger 2003 for a helpful overview of the Beardsley-Dickie debate), they nevertheless went a long way toward shaping that debate, which taken as whole might be seen as the working out of an answer to the question “What can a theory of aesthetic experience be that takes seriously the distinction between the experience of features and the features of experience?” The answer turned out to be an externalist theory of the sort that Beardsley advances in the 1970 essay “The Aesthetic Point of View” and that many others have advanced since: a theory according to which an aesthetic experience just is an experience having aesthetic content, i.e., an experience of an object as having the aesthetic features that it has.

The shift from internalism to externalism has meant that one central ambition of internalism—that of tying the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ to features internal to aesthetic experience—has had to be given up. But a second, equally central, ambition—that of accounting for aesthetic value by grounding it in the value of aesthetic experience—has been retained. The following section takes up the development and prospects of such accounts.

2.5 Aesthetic Value

To count as complete a theory of aesthetic value must answer two questions:

• What makes aesthetic value aesthetic?
• What makes aesthetic value value?

The literature refers to the first question sometimes as the aesthetic question (Lopes 2018, 41–43; Shelley 2019, 1) and sometimes as the demarcation question (van der Berg 2020, 2; Matherne 2020, 315; Peacocke 2021, 165). It refers to the second as the normative question (Lopes 2018, 41–43; Shelley 2019, 1; Matherne 2020, 315).

The prevailing answer to the aesthetic question is aesthetic formalism , the view that aesthetic value is aesthetic because objects bear it in virtue of their perceptual properties, where these encompass visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile properties. Aesthetic formalism rose to prominence when and because artistic formalism did, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see Section 5.1). Because everyone then took artistic value to be a species of aesthetic value, artistic formalism could gain prominence only by dragging aesthetic formalism in its train. But whereas artistic formalism has since fallen from favor, aesthetic formalism has held its ground. The explanation, arguably, has to do with the way aesthetic formalism honors the conceptual link between the aesthetic and the perceptual. Any adequate answer to the aesthetic question must meet what we may call the perceptual constraint , that is, it must plausibly articulate the sense in which aesthetic value is perceptual. Aesthetic formalism does this in the clearest possible terms.

Versions of aesthetic formalism come in varying strengths. Its strongest versions hold objects to have aesthetic value strictly in virtue of their perceptual properties (Bell 1958/1914; Danto 2003, 92). Weaker versions either allow objects to have aesthetic value in virtue of their non-perceptual content so long as that content expresses itself perpetually (Zangwill 1998, 71–72) or require merely that objects paradigmatically have aesthetic value in virtue of their perceptual properties (Levinson 1996, 6). All versions of aesthetic formalism struggle, one way or another, to accommodate our long-standing practice of ascribing aesthetic value to objects that do not address themselves primarily to the five bodily senses. Consider works of literature. We have been ascribing aesthetic value to them for as long as we have been ascribing aesthetic value to artworks of any kind. How might the aesthetic theorist square her theory with this practice? A first approach is simply to dismiss that practice, regarding its participants as linguistically confused, as applying terms of aesthetic praise to objects constitutionally incapable of meriting it (Danto 2003, 92). But given how extremely revisionist this approach is, we ought to wait on an argument of proportionately extreme strength before adopting it. A second approach allows that literary works bear aesthetic value, but only in virtue of their sensory properties, such as properties associated with assonance, consonance, rhythm, and imagery (Urmson 1957, 85–86, 88; Zangwill 2001, 135–140). But this approach accounts for a mere fraction of the aesthetic value we routinely ascribe to works of literature. Suppose you praise a short story for the eloquence of its prose and the beauty of its plot-structure. It seems arbitrary to count only the eloquence as a genuine instance of aesthetic value. A third approach treats literary works as exceptional, allowing them, alone among works of art, to bear aesthetic value in virtue of their non-perceptual properties (Binkley 1970, 269; Levinson 1996, 6 n.9). The difficulty here is to explain literature’s exceptionality. If literary works somehow bear aesthetic value in virtue of non-perceptual properties, what prevents non-literary works from doing the same? Moreover, to whatever degree we allow things to have aesthetic value in virtue of their non-perceptual properties, to that degree we sever the connection the formalist asserts between the aesthetic and the perceptual and so undermine our reason for adopting aesthetic formalism in the first place.

We might be forced to choose from among these three formalist approaches to literature if aesthetic formalism constituted the only plausible articulation of the sense in which aesthetic value is perceptual, but it doesn’t. Instead of holding that aesthetic value is perceptual because things have it in virtue of their perpetual properties, one might hold that aesthetic value is perceptual because we perceive things as having it. This would be a corollary of the immediacy thesis as defined in Section 1.1. If, as that thesis holds, aesthetic judgment is perceptual, having all the immediacy of any standard perceptual judgment, then aesthetic properties are perceptual, grasped with all the immediacy of standard perceptual properties. That aesthetic properties are thus perceptual is Sibley’s point in the following:

It is of importance to note first that, broadly speaking, aesthetics deals with a kind of perception. People have to see the grace or unity of a work, hear the plaintiveness or frenzy in the music, notice the gaudiness of a colour scheme, feel the power of a novel, its mood, or its uncertainty of tone. (Sibley 2001, 34, emphasis in original)

Sibley says that people have to see the grace or unity of a work and they have to feel the power of a novel. He doesn’t say that they have to see the properties in virtue of which a work has grace or unity or feel the properties in virtue of which a novel has power: the properties in virtue of which a work has grace or unity need not be perceptual and the properties in virtue of which a novel has power presumably will not be. Thus the literature problem, over which formalism stumbles, does not arise for Sibley, nor for anyone else committed to the immediacy thesis, including Shaftesbury (Cooper 1711, 17, 231), Hutcheson (1725, 16–24), Hume (1751, Section I), and Reid (1785, 760–761), among others. For the immediacy theorist, the aesthetic value we ascribe to literary works is aesthetic because we perceive literary works as bearing it.

The prevailing answer to the normative question is aesthetic hedonism , the view that aesthetic value is value because things having it give pleasure when experienced. Aesthetic hedonism achieved prominence in the 19th century, roughly when aesthetic formalism did. Schopenhauer played a pivotal role in bringing it to prominence by reassigning disinterested pleasure from the role it had been playing in aesthetic judgment to the role of grounding aesthetic value (Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], 195–200). Bentham (1789, ch. 4) and Mill (1863 [2001]; ch. 2) arguably played larger roles by popularizing value hedonism, that is, the view that pleasure is the ground of all value. But whereas value hedonism no longer holds much sway in ethics, and Schopenhauer no longer exerts much influence in aesthetics, aesthetic hedonism has held its ground. The explanation presumably has to do with the apparent ease with which aesthetic hedonism explains why we seek out objects of aesthetic value. Any adequate answer to the normative question must meet what we may call the normative constraint , that is, it must plausibly identify what a thing’s having aesthetic value gives us reason to do. Aesthetic hedonism, locating that reason in the pleasure taken in experiencing aesthetically valuable objects, does this in the clearest possible terms.

Advocates of aesthetic hedonism include Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], Clive Bell 1914 [1958], C. I. Lewis 1946, Monroe Beardsley 1982, George Dickie 1988, Alan Goldman 1990, Kendall Walton 1993, Malcolm Budd 1995, Jerrold Levinson 1996, 2002, Gary Iseminger 2004, Robert Stecker 2006, 2019, Nick Stang 2010 and Mohan Matthen 2017. It is only quite recently that any sustained opposition to hedonism has arisen, a fact that may go some way toward explaining why hedonists, as a rule, see no need to argue for their view, opting instead to develop it in light of objections an imagined opposition might make.

Beardsley, for instance, leads with this simple formulation of hedonism:

The aesthetic value of an object is the value it possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification. (Beardsley 1982, 21).

But he then anticipates a fatal objection. Sometimes we undervalue aesthetic objects, finding them to have less value than they actually have; other times we overvalue aesthetic objects, finding them to have greater value than they actually have. The simple formulation above is consistent with undervaluation, since it is possible to take less aesthetic pleasure from an object than it has the capacity to provide, but inconsistent with overvaluation, since it is impossible to take greater aesthetic pleasure from an object than it has the capacity to provide (Beardsley 1982, 26–27). To remedy this problem, Beardsley appends a rider:

The aesthetic value of [an object] is the value [it] possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification when correctly and completely experienced (Beardsley 1982, 27, italics in original).

Suppose we refer to the italicized portion of this formulation as the epistemic qualification and the non-italicized portion as the hedonic thesis . The epistemic qualification renders the hedonic thesis consistent with overvaluation, given that you can misapprehend an object such that you take greater aesthetic pleasure from it than it has the capacity to provide when apprehended correctly and completely.

Beardsley’s version of aesthetic hedonism has served as a model for subsequent versions (Levinson 2002, n. 23); at least all subsequent versions consist of an epistemically qualified hedonic thesis in some form. Beardsley’s version, however, seems open to counter-example. Consider Tony Morrison’s Beloved , for instance, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Taking pleasure from works designed to cause shock, horror, despair, or moral revulsion may seem perverse; surely, it may seem, such works do not have whatever aesthetic value they have in virtue of any pleasure they give. One way to accommodate such cases is to cast aesthetic pleasure as a higher-order response, that is, a response that depends on lower-order responses, which in some cases might include shock, horror, despair, and moral revulsion (Walton 1993, 508; Levinson 1992, 18). Another way is to broaden the field of experiences that may ground aesthetic value. Though pleasure as a rule grounds aesthetic value, in exceptional cases certain non-hedonic yet intrinsically valuable experiences—which may include horror, shock, despair, and revulsion—may also do so (Levinson 1992, 12; Stecker 2005, 12). The literature refers to this latter, broadened variety of hedonism as aesthetic empiricism ; it hasn’t settled on a name for the former variety, but we may call it tiered hedonism , given the varying levels of response it takes aesthetic experience to comprise.

Yet another objection, anticipated by hedonists, holds hedonism to imply the heresy of the separable experience (Budd 1985, 125). It is a commonplace that for any object bearing aesthetic value nothing other than it can have just the particular value it has, excepting the improbable case in which something other than it has just its particular aesthetic character. The worry is that hedonism, given that it regards aesthetic value as instrumental to the value of experience, implies that for any object bearing aesthetic value something wholly other from it, such as a drug, might induce the same experience and so serve up the same value. The hedonist’s usual reply is to assert that aesthetic experience is inseparable from its object, such that for any aesthetic experience, that experience is just the particular experience it is because it has just the particular aesthetic object it has (Levinson 1996, 22–23; Budd 1985, 123–124; S. Davies 1994: 315–16; Stang 2012, 271–272).

Actual opposition to hedonism did not materialize until the present century (Sharpe 2000, Davies 2004), and most all of that during the past decade or so (Shelley 2010, 2011, 2019; Wolf 2011; Lopes 2015, 2018; Gorodeisky 2021a, 2021b). Why the opposition took so long to show up is a good question. It is tempting to think its answer resides in the obvious truth of the hedonist’s central premise, namely, that aesthetically valuable objects please us, at least in general. Anti-hedonists, however, have taken no interest in denying this premise. One useful way to think of the dialectic between hedonists and their opponents is to regard each as grasping one horn of an aesthetic version of the Euthyphro dilemma, where hedonists hold things to have aesthetic value because they please and anti-hedonists hold things to please because they have aesthetic value (Augustine 2005/389–391, De vera religione §59; Gorodeisky 2012a, 201 and 2021b, 262). Seen this way, the fact that aesthetically valuable things please tells not at all in favor of the hedonist; indeed, it is precisely this fact that the anti-hedonist thinks the hedonist cannot explain.

For instance, Wolf, in the context of an extended, nuanced case against value welfarism, argues that aesthetic hedonism cannot account for the fact that Middlemarch is a better novel than the Da Vinci Code ,given that most people apparently like the latter better, presumably because it gives them greater pleasure (Wolf 2011, 54–55; see also Sharpe 2000, 326). The hedonist has a ready reply in the claim that all standard versions of hedonism are now epistemically qualified, that while most people may derive greater pleasure from the Da Vinci Code , a fully informed reader—that is, a reader who gives both texts a correct and complete reading—will not, assuming Middlemarch to be the better novel. But it’s not clear how much appeal to the epistemic qualification ultimately helps the hedonist. The anti-hedonist will want to know what best explains the fact that a fully informed reader will derive greater pleasure from Middlemarch (Wolf 2011, 55; D. Davies 2004, 258–259; Sharpe 2000, 325). Suppose we say that it owes to the fully informed reader’s grasping the superiority of Middlemarch’s structure, the higher quality of its prose, the greater subtlety and depth of its character development, and the greater penetration of the insights it affords (Wolf 2011, 55). Wouldn’t we then be saying that it owes to her grasping the greater aesthetic value of Middlemarch ? Wouldn’t that be part of what a fully informed reader is fully informed about?

Of course, the hedonist may allow Middlemarch to be aesthetically better because of its superior structure, prose, character development, and insight; to allow this, from her point of view, is simply to allow that these are the elements in virtue of which a fully informed reader will derive greater pleasure. But here it would be good if the hedonist had an argument. Otherwise, the anti-hedonist will rightly wonder how it is that a correct and complete experience of Middlemarch will be an experience of every value-conferring feature of Middlemarch yet not an experience of the value conferred by those features. She will rightly wonder whether the hedonist fails to honor her own commitment to externalism about aesthetic value; she will rightly wonder, in other words, whether the hedonist fails to distinguish between a valuable experience and an experience of value, just as the internalist about aesthetic value fails to distinguish between a coherent and complete experience and an experience of coherence and completeness.

Earlier we attributed the appeal of hedonism to the apparent ease with which it explains our seeking out objects of aesthetic value. Anti-hedonists take that ease to be apparent merely. Some anti-hedonists, for instance, argue that at least some aesthetically valuable objects offer up pleasure only on condition that we do not seek it (Lopes 2018, 84–86; Ven der Berg 2020, 5–6; see also Elster 1983, 77–85). Lopes puts the point this way:

Sometimes an agent has an aesthetic reason to act and yet they could not be motivated to act out of a hedonic desire that would be satisfied by their so acting. To get any pleasure, they must act out of non-hedonic motives. Strolling through the Louvre, they happen upon the Chardins, and they look at them. So long as they do not look seeking pleasure, they get the pleasure that the paintings afford (Lopes 2018, 85–86).

Lopes’s choice of example is not arbitrary. There are particular art-critical reasons for thinking that Chardins will frustrate the hedonically motivated viewer (Fried 1980, 92; cited in Lopes 2018, 85), and Lopes is careful to claim that only “some aesthetic pleasures are essential by-products of acts motivated by other considerations” (Lopes 2018, 85). But it’s not as if Lopes’s claim is specific to Chardins. Consider again Wolf’s assertation that most readers take greater pleasure from The Da Vinci Code than from Middlemarch . If that assertion is correct, as it plausibly is, perhaps this is because (a) most readers read for pleasure, and (b) The Da Vinci Code affords pleasure to readers who read for it, whereas (c) Middlemarch withholds pleasure from such readers, affording pleasure instead on readers who read in pursuit of some non-hedonic good.

There is an apparent tension, moreover, between the hedonist’s reliance on the epistemic qualification and her claim that pleasure rationalizes our aesthetic pursuits. Consider the less-than-fully-informed reader who overvalues The Da Vinci Code and undervalues Middlemarch . The epistemic qualification is designed to allow the hedonist to explain how this might occur: such a reader takes greater pleasure from The Da Vinci Code , and less (or lesser) pleasure from Middlemarch , than she would were she fully informed. The epistemic qualification, moreover, allows the hedonist to explain why the uninformed reader has aesthetic reason not to undervalue Middlemarch: she is missing out on pleasure that would be hers if only she gave Middlemarch a fully informed reading. But the hedonist struggles to explain why the uninformed reader has reason not to overvalue the Da Vinci Code . If The Da Vinci Code gives the reader greater pleasure when she overvalues it, not only has she no aesthetic reason to be fully informed, she has aesthetic reason not to be. It therefore seems that if pleasure rationalized our hedonic pursuits, we would take ourselves to have reason to experience aesthetic objects in whatever way maximizes our pleasure. To the degree that we instead take ourselves to have reason to experience aesthetic objects completely and correctly—to the degree that we instead take ourselves to have reason to experience aesthetic objects as having the aesthetic values they in fact have—suggests that pleasure is not the aesthetic good we’re after (Shelley 2011).

But if pleasure is not the aesthetic good we’re after, what is? Part of hedonism’s perceived inevitability over the past century or so has owed to our inability even to imagine alternatives to it. If opposition to hedonism has been slow to materialize, alternatives have been slower still. To date, the only fully realized alternative to hedonism is Lopes’s network theory of aesthetic normativity, articulated and defended in his ground-breaking Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value (2018).

Earlier we noted how Lopes challenges the hedonist on her own terms, objecting that she cannot adequately explain why we seek out objects of aesthetic value, given that aesthetic pleasure is at least sometimes an essential by-product of our seeking after something else (2018, 84–86). Lopes’s deeper challenge, however, targets the hedonist’s very terms. Aesthetic considerations rationalize a very great variety of aesthetic acts, according to Lopes: appreciating objects of aesthetic value is one such act, but so too is hanging a poster one way rather than another, selecting this book rather than that one for a book club, building out a garden this way rather than that, conserving one video game rather than another, pairing this dish with this wine rather than that one, and so on ad infinitum (2018, 32–36). If a theory of aesthetic value is to accommodate such a vast range of aesthetic acts, without singling out any one as more central than the others, it will have to conceive of aesthetic normativity as a species of some very general kind of normativity. Lopes, accordingly, conceives of aesthetic normativity as a species of the most generic form of practical normativity; that aesthetic acts ought to be performed well follows from the premise that all acts ought to be performed well for the simple reason that they are acts (2018, 135–137). As Lopes puts it: “Aesthetic values inherit their practical normativity from a basic condition of all agency—agents must use what they have to perform successfully” (2018, 135). Just which competencies an aesthetic agent may call upon to perform successfully on any given occasion depends on the particular role they happen to be playing in the particular social practice in which they happen to be performing (2018, 135). It is from the fact that all aesthetic activity necessarily takes place within the domain of some particular social practice that the network theory of aesthetic value takes its name (2018, 119).

In holding aesthetic agents to be performing the greatest variety of aesthetic acts on the greatest variety of items in coordination with one another, the network theory departs radically from hedonism. But, as Lopes himself observes, the network theory follows after hedonism in one fundamental way: inasmuch as both theories “answer the normative question but offer nothing in answer to the aesthetic question,” both “are consistent with any stand-alone answer to the aesthetic question” (2018, 48). The claim that the normative and aesthetic questions admit of stand-alone answers implies that aesthetic value is a species of the genus value in a standard species-genus relation, such that what makes aesthetic value value has no bearing on what makes it aesthetic and vice-versa. It therefore also implies that aesthetic value is not a determinate of the determinable value , such that what makes aesthetic value aesthetic is very thing that makes it value.

Do answers to the normative and aesthetic questions stand alone or stand together? If we have not yet registered the urgency of this question, perhaps that is because no one has yet fully articulated, let alone defended, a theory of aesthetic value according to which aesthetic value is a determinate form of value. Such a theory appears to be implicit, however, in Shelley 2011, Watkins and Shelley 2012, Gorodeisky and Marcus 2018, Gorodeisky 2021a, and Shelley 2022. The position common to these authors has been dubbed the Auburn view (Van der Berg 2020, 11). It answers the aesthetic question, and therein the value question, by holding an item’s having aesthetic value to rationalize its appreciation in a distinctively self-reflexive way, such that part of what you perceive when you appreciate an aesthetically valuable item is that it ought to be appreciated as you appreciating it (Shelley 2011, 220–222; Watkins and Shelley 2012, 348–350; Gorodeisky and Marcus 2018, 117–119; Gorodeisky 2021a, 200, 207; Shelley 2022, 12). The network theorist may object that the Auburn view privileges acts of appreciation as surely as hedonism does, but such an objection, from the Auburn perspective, begs the question. It is in assuming that the normative and aesthetic questions admit of stand-alone answers that the network theorist grants herself the freedom of passing on the aesthetic question, and it is in passing on the aesthetic question that she grants herself the freedom of treating each of a very great variety of aesthetic acts as equally central. It is in assuming that aesthetic value is a determinate of the determinable value , meanwhile, that the Auburnite places herself under the necessity of answering the aesthetic question, and it is in seeking an answer to the aesthetic question that she places herself under the necessity of singling out appreciation as aesthetically central. The network theorist and the Auburnite agree that the aesthetic question deserves an answer sooner or later (Lopes 2018, 46). They disagree, crucially, about whether it deserves an answer sooner rather than later.

The network theory and the Auburn view hardly exhaust the options for non-hedonic theories of aesthetic normativity: Nguyen 2019, Matherne 2020, Peacocke 2021, Kubala 2021, and Riggle 2022 all represent promising new directions. Yet every new theory of aesthetic value, hedonic or not, must follow after the network theory or the Auburn view in regarding answers to the normative and aesthetic questions as stand-alone or stand-together. A lot hangs on the decision to follow one path rather than the other. Perhaps it’s time we attend to it.

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What constitutes beauty and how is it perceived?

Role of social media may create unrealistic expectations for cosmetic procedures.

Beauty has many facets. Research shows there are many biological, psychological, cultural and social aspects that influence how beauty and attractiveness are perceived.

Researchers now believe that beauty preferences are partly an effect of a rudimentary cognitive process that appears quite early in life, with humans having a seemingly automatic ability to categorize a person as beautiful or not. Scientific literature supports such physical features as universal criteria for human attractiveness.

"This instantaneous capability of human beauty categorization is partially determined by a function of physical features, such as facial averageness, symmetry and skin homogeneity," explains corresponding author Neelam Vashi, MD, associate professor of dermatology at Boston University School of Medicine and director of the Boston University Cosmetic and Laser Center at Boston Medical Center, writes in a commentary in the journal Clinics in Dermatology .

However, the perception of attractiveness has fluctuated drastically over time. For example, a review of widely viewed images in Western culture over the course of the 20th century provides an example of the evolution of the beautiful female body. While a waist-to-hip ratio has stayed relatively constant, there have been wide variations of body mass index across cultures and time periods. The multifaceted concept of beauty shows that perception can change depending on the individual, society and/or historical period.

In addition, previous studies have attributed beauty and attractiveness to relatively stable face and body characteristics such as shape and symmetry. However, recent studies suggest that what each person perceives as beautiful stems from a complicated process influenced by both their environment and their perceptual adaptation (an experience-based process that reshapes how we perceive our environment). "It is important to note that what each person considers to be 'beautiful' is constantly being updated by his or her own experiences thus contributing to a mental depiction of what attractiveness means to that particular individual," Vashi said.

According to Vashi, for decades, the mass media platform has introduced certain criteria to what establishes beauty, and more recently social media, instant photo sharing and editing apps have further influenced how society adapts to beauty principles. "Unfortunately, a selfie, filtered or not, may not correspond to a patient's reflection in the mirror, and may lead to an unrealistic and unattainable perfect beauty sought through cosmetic surgery and procedures."

Vashi believes true beauty is likely an evolving interplay between time-constant biological traits and the continuous molding that occurs through exposures in our environment. Clinicians should counsel patients on the importance of understanding that each individual has his or her own beauty and unique features and that an individualized and natural approach to cosmetic procedures are key to beauty enhancing procedures.

• Social Psychology
• Spirituality
• Popular Culture
• Social Issues
• Public Health
• Facial symmetry
• Familiarity increases liking
• Social cognition
• Social psychology
• Evolutionary psychology
• Mental illness

Story Source:

Materials provided by Boston University School of Medicine . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Mayra B.C. Maymone, Melissa Laughter, Jeffrey Dover, Neelam A. Vashi. The Malleability of Beauty: Perceptual Adaptation . Clinics in Dermatology , 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.clindermatol.2019.05.002

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Beauty — What Is Beauty: Inner and Physical

What is Beauty: Inner and Physical

• Categories: Beauty Physical Appearance

About this sample

Words: 1078 |

Updated: 23 November, 2023

Words: 1078 | Page: 1 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Aristotle. (1999). Poetics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (pp. 1453-1492). Modern Library.
• Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press.
• Eagan, D. J. (2017). The Social Psychology of Facial Appearance. Springer.
• Etcoff, N. (2000). Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. Anchor Books.
• Kant, I. (2009). Critique of Judgment. Oxford University Press.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249-291.
• Platon. (2005). The Symposium. In S. R. Slings (Ed.), Plato Complete Works (pp. 461-512). Hackett Publishing Company.
• Scruton, R. (2009). Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
• Sontag, S. (1978). The Double Standard of Aging. Saturday Review, 5-7.
• Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. Harper Perennial.

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Ballaro, B., & Wagner, A. (n.d.). Body Image in the Media. In Media and Society (pp. 72-83). Retrieved from [...]

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The Beauty Myth: Prescriptive Beauty Norms for Women Reflect Hierarchy-Enhancing Motivations Leading to Discriminatory Employment Practices

The “prescriptive beauty norm” reflects a desire to enhance gender hierarchy and contributes to social policing of women and employment discrimination practices known as the “beauty tax.”.

Cite this Article

Ramati-Ziber, Leeat, et al. "The Beauty Myth: Prescriptive Beauty Norms for Women Reflect Hierarchy-Enhancing Motivations Leading to Discriminatory Employment Practices." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019, pp. 1-27. DOI: /10.1037/pspi0000209.

Ramati-Ziber, L., Shnabel, N., & Glick, P. (2019). The beauty myth: prescriptive beauty norms for women reflect hierarchy-enhancing motivations leading to discriminatory employment practices. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1-27. DOI: /10.1037/pspi0000209.

Ramati-Ziber, Leeat, Nurit Shnabel, and Peter Glick. "The Beauty Myth: Prescriptive Beauty Norms for Women Reflect Hierarchy-Enhancing Motivations Leading to Discriminatory Employment Practices." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2019): 1-27. DOI: /10.1037/pspi0000209.            

Leeat Ramati-Ziber

Nurit shnabel, peter glick.

• Introduction
• Methodology

American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day and make up 80-90% of the $115 billion industry for beauty products, affecting both their time and financial resources.

Feminist writers have long critiqued the burden that beauty imperatives place on women. A key critique came from Naomi Wolf, who argued that after feminism’s “second wave,” the pressure placed on women to pursue beauty increased dramatically, reflecting a backlash against women’s progress and increasing power in workplaces and other domains. The “prescriptive beauty norm” (PBN), is a term that describes this social phenomenon, where women feel social pressure to intensively pursue beauty.

Social science research shows that women’s belief that their value is determined by their beauty, which translates into their self-objectification (viewing their bodies from an external perspective), negatively impacts women and gender equality. Women’s self-objectification has been found to be associated with decreased political activism for gender equality, less assertiveness in cross-gender interactions, and poorer performance on math assessments. When women are objectified (e.g., evaluated based on their appearance) observers perceive them as less competent.

This study tests cultural critics’ hypotheses, assessing 1) the motivations behind those who uphold the Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN), 2) the workplace backlash, known as the “beauty tax,” against women who fail to conform, and 3) the relationship between the PBN and orthodox religious values that uphold gender hierarchy.

The Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN) reflects a desire to enhance gender hierarchy and contributes to social policing of women and employment discrimination practices known as the “beauty tax.”

Those who subscribe to the PBN are more likely to have values and ideologies that seek to enhance gender hierarchies, or the dominance of men over women in society.

This is not the case for those who merely subscribe to beauty ideals (such as valuing certain traits like youth or thinness), or those who believe that beauty is attainable but do not demand that women pursue beauty.

When primed to think that gender hierarchies are being threatened, people who hold sexist ideals are more likely to endorse PBN.

When employees climb the professional ladder they are required to invest more in their appearance. Yet this “beauty tax”; namely, demand for extra investment is higher for women than for men.

Women face the biggest backlash when they most threaten existing power and gender hierarchies.

Female job candidates who are “insufficiently groomed” are more likely to experience backlash; namely, be judged as unqualified for the job, if they are interviewed by someone who holds sexist ideals.

This effect is particularly significant if they are interviewing for a high-power (vs. low power) job, in a predominantly masculine field.

Religiously orthodox people are more likely than secular people to endorse sexist ideals, but not the PBN. Researchers interpreted this as confirming the arguments made by feminist critics, who claimed that, in an age of increasing secularization, the PBN replaced orthodox religious values such as chastity as an alternative way to control women.

Researchers conducted six studies on a total of 1,867 adult volunteers to investigate the motivations behind and the effects of the Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN). To distinguish between related concepts, they designed questions in all of their studies to differentiate between three related ideals: 1) having beauty standards, such as valuing certain attributes like youth, thinness, grooming practices, 2) attainability, such as believing that can attain beauty via various practices, 3) the PBN, such as believing that women should intensively invest their time and resources into pursuing beauty.

In order to conceal the nature of the study from participants, researchers worded the statements about the PBN in neutral vocabulary, so as not to appear obviously sexist. Furthermore, in studying the relationship between the PBN and sexist ideals, the researchers separately tested for hostile sexist beliefs (such as those demeaning women) and benevolent sexist beliefs (such as idealizing women as caregivers and romantic objects). All studies were conducted using questionnaires.

Study 1a and 1b tested whether those who endorse the PBN are motivated by desires to enhance gender hierarchies. Study 2 tested whether priming participants with threats to the gender hierarchy would be more likely to endorse the PBN. Study 3 tested whether sexist people are more likely to impose a “beauty tax” to push women employees. There were 12 occupations that were tested, which fell into 6 domains: politics, natural science, insurance, prison, municipal system, and finance.

Study 4 tested the relationship between many of the previous findings and investigated whether hierarchy-enhancing motives was associated with PBN endorsement and resulted in increased backlash against female employees. Condemnation of women who failed to pursue beauty was measured through the participants’ replies to statements such as “A woman who neglects her appearance should be ashamed of herself,” “When a woman neglects her appearance it conveys disrespect to others in her environment,” “I find it disgusting that some women totally neglect their appearance,” and “Women who choose not to invest in their appearance do not harm anyone.”

Study 5 tested whether people who have experience interviewing candidates have punished female candidates who were poorly groomed by judging them to be less qualified for the job. Study 6 tested whether people with conservative religious values that uphold gender hierarchies are more likely to disavow the PBN.

Random assignment was used in multiple aspects of these studies, such as to determine which participants would receive the messages about the gender hierarchy being threatened vs. affirmed, whether participants would face a scenario of interviewing male or female job candidates, and whether a candidate in question was pursuing a low- or high-power job.

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Why Beauty Matters

On the 12 th  of January, the world lost a great philosopher, public intellectual, and a rare voice championing the importance of beauty.

Roger Scruton dedicated himself to nurturing beauty and “re-enchanting the world.” In his documentary “Why Beauty Matters”, Scruton argues that beauty is a universal human need that elevates us and gives meaning to life. He sees beauty as a value, as important as truth or goodness, that can offer “consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy”, therefore showing human life to be worthwhile.

According to Scruton, beauty is being lost in our modern world, particularly in the fields of art and architecture. I grew up in London and was often confused by much of modern art and new architecture. In life and in art I have chosen to see the beauty in things, locating myself in Florence, where I am surrounded by beauty, and understand the impact it can have on the everyday.

Scruton’s disdain for modern art begins with Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Originally a satirical piece designed to mock the world of art and the snobberies that go with it, it has come to mean that anything can be art and anyone can be an artist. A “cult of ugliness” was created where originality is placed above beauty and the idea became more important than the artwork itself. He argues that art became a joke, endorsed by critics, doing away with a need for skill, taste or creativity.

This resonated with me in particular and brought to mind my Foundation Course at The Chelsea College of Art in London over 10 years ago. I was excited to finally be at art school, only to be discouraged from painting and drawing by the tutors and told that it was old fashioned and no longer relevant. I was encouraged instead to make art using found objects. I made sculptures out of plastic cutlery and developed an aptitude for bullshit during the group presentations. Everything was phallic or nostalgic. These words gave me praise from the tutors.

Scruton meets the artist Michael Craig-Martin and asks him about how Duchamp’s urinal first made him feel. Martin is best known for his work “An Oak Tree” which is a glass of water on a shelf, with text beside it explaining why it is an oak tree. Martin argues that Duchamp captures the imagination and that art is an art because we think of it as such.

When I first saw “An Oak Tree” I was confused and felt perhaps I didn’t have the intellect to understand it. When I’d later question it at art school, the response was always “You just don’t get it,” which became a common defense. To me, it was reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s short tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid or incompetent. In reality, they make no clothes at all.

Scruton argues that the consumerist culture has been the catalyst for this change in modern art. We are always being sold something, through advertisements that feed our appetite for stuff, adverts try to be brash and outrageous to catch our attention. Art mimics advertising as artists attempt to create brands, the product that they sell is themselves. The more shocking and outrageous the artwork, the more attention it receives. Scruton is particularly disturbed by Piero Manzoni’s artwork “Artist’s Shit” which consists of 90 tin cans filled with the artist’s excrement.

A common argument for modern art is that it is reflecting modern life in all of its disorder and ugliness. Scruton suggests that great art has always shown the real in the light of the ideal and that in doing so it is transfigured.

A great painting does not necessarily have a beautiful subject matter, but it is made beautiful through the artist’s interpretation of it. Rembrandt shows this with his portraits of crinkly old women and men or the compassion and kindness of which Velazquez paints the dwarfs in the Spanish court. Modern art often takes the literal subject matter and misses the creative act. Scruton expresses this point using the comparison of Tracey Emin’s artwork ‘My Bed’ and a painting by Delacroix of the artist’s bed.

The subject matters are the same. The unmade beds in all of their sordid disdain. Delacroix brings beauty to a thing that lacks it through the considered artistry of his interpretation and by doing so, places a blessing on his own emotional chaos. Emin shares the ugliness that the bed shows by using the literal bed. According to Emin, it is art because she says that it is so.

Philosophers argued that through the pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as our home. Traditional architecture places beauty before utility, with ornate decorative details and proportions that satisfy our need for harmony. It reminds us that we have more than just practical needs but moral and spiritual needs too. Oscar Wilde said “All art is absolutely useless,” intended as praise by placing art above utility and on a level with love, friendship, and worship. These are not necessarily useful but are needed.

We have all experienced the feeling when we see something beautiful. To be transported by beauty, from the ordinary world to, as Scruton calls it, “the illuminated sphere of contemplation.” It is as if we feel the presence of a higher world. Since the beginning of western civilization, poets and philosophers have seen the experience of beauty as a calling to the divine.

Plato described beauty as a cosmic force flowing through us in the form of sexual desire. He separated the divine from sexuality through the distinction between love and lust. To lust is to take for oneself, whereas to love is to give. Platonic love removes lust and invites us to engage with it spiritually and not physically.

 “Beauty is a visitor from another world. We can do nothing with it save contemplate its pure radiance.” – Plato

Art and beauty were traditionally aligned in religious works of art. Science impacted religion and created a spiritual vacuum. People began to look to nature for beauty, and there was a shift from religious works of art to paintings of landscapes and human life.

In today’s world of art and architecture, beauty is looked upon as a thing of the past with disdain. Scruton’s vision of beauty gives meaning to the world and saves us from meaningless routines to take us to a place of higher contemplation. He encourages us not to take revenge on reality by expressing its ugliness, but to return to where the real and the ideal may still exist in harmony “consoling our sorrows and amplifying our joys.”

When you train any of your senses you are privy to a heightened world. The artist sees beauty everywhere and they are able to draw that beauty out to show to others. I find the most beauty in nature, and nature the best catalyst for creativity. The Tonalist painter George Inness advised artists to paint their emotional response to their subject, so that the viewer may hope to feel it too. This is at the core of my artistic pursuit. To express my love of the natural world, and to share that beauty with others.

Six years ago, I was awarded the Alpine fellowship based on my essay on my ‘Aesthetic vision in Art’. The prize was to spend three weeks in Switzerland painting and discussing art. Roger Scruton lectured to us about the importance of beauty and was very much in support of the resurgence of representational art. He was a kind and witty man, who smiled when I described my life as an artist in Florence.

Amy Florence

Wonderful essay and tribute. Thank you.

Well put, Amy! It is good to hear the transcendentals mentioned in an Art setting.

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Revisiting ‘The Beauty Myth’: What Are the Ethics of Applying Bad Facts to a Good Cause?

The message of oppressive beauty standards in Naomi Wolf’s feminist classic remains relevant, though faulty statistics plague its credibility.

Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women has long been heralded as one of the greatest feminist books written. Many women have confessed that Wolf’s book was the antidote that woke them from the thrall of advertising, glamour and the intense need to conform to physical perfection. Although revolutionary in its prose and critical analysis, Wolf’s book fails at one vital juncture: accuracy.

In The Beauty Myth , Wolf argues that the standard of beauty and feminine traits assigned to women are devaluing. Women from all walks of life cannot seize power and happiness completely, because their insecurity at personal appearance — while bombarded by brands, fashion editorials, and pornography — is so profound that it mentally pulls them back. Wolf writes, “The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.” It was a groundbreaking idea for its time.

However, a problem regarding the book reemerged during a recent controversy that Wolf encountered while publicizing her new book, Outrages , a documentation of Victorian-era same-sex relationships and their persecution. While Wolf was explaining how the last recorded execution for the above was misreported as 1835, host Matthew Sweet interjected saying, “Several dozen executions? I don’t think you’re right about this.” He then went on to disprove this key element in Outrages by both pointing out that ‘deaths recorded’ was the Victorian Court term for pardons, and that the term ‘sodomy’ used to record these crimes was then applicable for both same-sex relationships and child abuse. Sweet added, “I can’t find any evidence that any of the relationships you describe were consensual.”

Though Wolf took it in her stride and corrected the above in her book, she has always had a problem with facts and statistics, often manipulating both to put across her point in a stronger manner . The Beauty Myth is no stranger to such manipulation, with Wolf having exaggerated statistics about anorexia — for example, stating around 7.5% of the total girls and women in the U.S. had anorexia , when the actual percentage was 0.065. So fraught was the book with incorrect statistics that there exists a critical research paper titled, “ A Critical Appraisal of the Anorexia Statistics in The Beauty Myth : Introducing Wolf’s Overdo and Lie Factor (WOLF) ,” which, in its abstract, states that “18 of the 23 statistics (regarding anorexia nervosa) are inaccurate and overdone” and that “on average, a statistic on anorexia by Naomi Wolf should be divided by eight to get close to the real figure.”

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This sort of fact-fudging is both patronizing and harmful. One one hand, Wolf infantilizes her mostly female readership by using numerous anorexia deaths as the great specter that would change their minds. On the other, it perpetuates the idea that people only fear diseases that reach epidemic proportions. Would a doctor show any less concern for a rare disease with terrifying implications? Wolf didn’t need to create an epidemic when the nature of the disease itself has always been bone-chilling. How could a potential survivor of anorexia, who also found solace in The Beauty Myth , come to terms with the use of her illness and trauma to fearmonger?

Other statistics in Wolf’s book haven’t fared too well either. In the 1991 review of The Beauty Myth, New York Times critic Caryn James points out that Wolf’s statistics were both dubiously sourced and dated. James wrote, “She makes the preposterous claim that in the United States only 48 percent of women use contraception regularly, her source is a 1984 pop-psychology book called Swept Away: Why Women Confuse Love and Sex . And who knows where those old numbers came from?”

Fact-checking isn’t the only problem with the book, which continues to grace budding feminists’ shelves. In the new introduction for the 2002 edition of The Beauty Myth, Wolf writes that “the latest fashions for seven and eight-year-olds recreate the outfits of pop stars who dress like sex workers.” The idea that children (or anyone) can be ‘sexualized’ by virtue of how they dress and the implied derision for sex work is oddly placed in a book about the corporatization of feminine beauty and insecurities, making it dated and insensitive.

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Ironically, a similar conclusion was drawn in the 1991 review of the book. Caryn James wrote , “(Wolf) examines how women’s magazines have substituted the impossible ideal of youthful beauty for the pre-feminist goal of a clean house and domestic bliss. But she writes as if women’s magazines were as powerful today as they were in the 1950s. More damaging, she virtually ignores how television, film, and videos have shaped women’s self-images and their bodies. How can any credible analysis of the way beauty tyrannizes women afford to ignore Oprah Winfrey’s liquid diet, Jane Fonda’s mega-hit exercise tapes or Madonna’s ever-changing sexual parade?”

Though Wolf acknowledges her inaccuracies, she ignores criticism. In a recent interview with The Guardian , she said, “I’m lucky. I had a good education. I know my books are true. They’re well sourced. They have hundreds of footnotes,” while fully aware of the various ways in which her research methodology has been picked apart over the years. Maybe, a reason to disregard criticism could be the confidence derived from Wolf’s privilege. (She came from a family of academics, read literature at Yale and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.) Someone with a more marginalized identity would’ve never found continued backing from publishers after a scandal like this.

Another reason could possibly be the lure of a larger cause. In the New York Times’s review of Outrages, critic Parul Sehgal writes, “The issue (with writers who misrepresent information) isn’t simply that publishers don’t spring for fact-checking and leave writers vulnerable to making such errors. These writers see themselves in service of something larger than grubby reporting. They are the emissaries of great stories, suppressed stories, and if they take liberties or eschew careful research — as consistently as Wolf has done — it is because they believe they have a right to them, that the story, the cause , somehow sanctions it.”

The cause makes the ethical implications of Wolf’s misrepresentation murkier. While any scholar worth their salt would place no value upon this book, the women who read and swore by it still do. This is because T he Beauty Myth’s cause has been that of the greater good — which makes it harder to dismiss entirely. Wolf’s observations – about women embodying beauty and men wanting to possess it; about the onus of beauty landing squarely on women’s shoulders — are all subjectively accurate and relatable. This discrepancy of false facts and subjective truths make Wolf look like some sort of feminist vigilante, trying any means necessary to get her point across, rather than the academic she’s branded herself as. In a world where women have to work twice as hard to be taken as seriously as their male counterparts, this doesn’t bode well — especially for feminist scholarship.

As children, we learn facts about the world around us and later grow up to realize that particular nuances of said facts may be incorrect. For example, we all learned as children that chameleons change color to camouflage themselves when the actual reason why they do so is a representation of mood and a change in body temperature . Perhaps, The Beauty Myth is a similar sort of primer: a solid exposure to critical feminist theory at a young age, that is best left behind slowly as one gathers more nuance and appreciation for facts.

Aditi Murti is a culture writer at The Swaddle. Previously, she worked as a freelance journalist focused on gender and cities. Find her on social media @aditimurti.

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