Beauty and Aesthetic Value

This topic examines beauty—long the paradigm aesthetic value—and the broader question of what aesthetic value is and whether it is objective, subjective, or relational.

Definition

Beauty is the central positive aesthetic value, traditionally explained in terms of properties such as harmony, proportion, and unity, while aesthetic value more broadly is the kind of worth a thing has in virtue of its aesthetic qualities and the experience it affords.

Scope

This topic covers the concept of beauty and the nature of aesthetic value: classical accounts of beauty as proportion, harmony, or unity; the objectivist, subjectivist, and relational positions on whether beauty is in the object or the response; the twentieth-century displacement of beauty by other aesthetic merits; and recent attempts to recover beauty's significance and link it to value and desire. It does not cover the normativity of aesthetic judgment as such or specific historical theories of taste, treated in sibling topics.

Core questions

• Is beauty an objective property, a subjective response, or a relation between the two?
• What is the relation between beauty and other aesthetic values?
• Why was beauty marginalized in twentieth-century art and aesthetics?
• How is aesthetic value related to pleasure, desire, and the good?

Key theories

Classical beauty as harmony and proportion

The long tradition from Pythagoras and Plato through the Renaissance treats beauty as objective order—unity in variety, proportion, and harmony of parts—perceptible by reason and the senses.

Beauty, desire, and value

Scarry and Nehamas reclaim beauty as central rather than marginal: Scarry links beauty to a desire for fairness and truth, while Nehamas treats beauty as a promise of a happiness bound up with desire and continued attention.

History

Beauty was the central aesthetic concept from antiquity, theorized as harmony and proportion by the Greeks, as radiance and unity in the Neoplatonic and medieval traditions, and as the object of taste in the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century beauty was eclipsed in both artistic practice and theory, displaced by other values and suspected of complicity with mere prettiness or ideology. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, writers such as Scarry and Nehamas argued for restoring beauty to a central place in aesthetics and ethics.

Debates

Objectivity vs. subjectivity of beauty

Whether beauty is a real property of objects, a feature of the perceiver's response, or a relation constituted by both has organized debate about beauty since antiquity.

The marginalization and return of beauty

Whether the twentieth-century suspicion of beauty was a justified critique of an ideologically loaded notion or a mistake to be corrected divides recent writers on aesthetic value.

Key figures

• Plato
• Plotinus
• Elaine Scarry
• Alexander Nehamas

Seminal works

• scarry1999
• nehamas2007

Frequently asked questions

Is beauty objective or subjective?

Philosophers divide three ways: objectivists treat beauty as a property of things, subjectivists as a feature of our responses, and relationalists as a relation between objects and suitably situated perceivers; the debate goes back to antiquity and remains unsettled.

Is beauty the only aesthetic value?

No. Beauty is the historically central aesthetic value, but works can also be elegant, sublime, graceful, powerful, or moving, and much modern art is valued for aesthetic merits other than beauty.