Beauty can mean different things to different people, but these definitions offer insight into how some of history’s greatest thinkers viewed beauty in various forms..
- Immanuel Kant: Beauty is a form of universal agreement, an “agreement in the imaginative faculty” that everyone finds pleasure in.
- Plato: Beauty is what brings forth “pleasure without desire” and an appreciation for perfection.
- Aristotle: Beauty is composed of three elements—order, symmetry, and definiteness.
- Friedrich Schiller: Beauty is an expression of the moral law within a person’s soul.
- Thomas Aquinas: Beauty lies in the form of an object that serves to represent its purpose or function.
- David Hume: Beauty results from a combination of order, uniformity, and variety.
- Edmund Burke: Beauty is a “harmony of all the parts” that together produce an overwhelming sense of pleasure.
- Immanuel Kant: Beauty involves both the subjective experience of pleasure and the objective recognition of order, symmetry, and definiteness.
- Arthur Schopenhauer: Beauty is an expression of the will to live.
- Friedrich Nietzsche: Beauty is a reflection of the eternal, universal laws of nature and truth.
People think beauty is a combination of different things. This includes order, symmetry, definiteness, morality, purpose, pleasure & truth. How these things work together can create a unique experience. We can learn from philosophers & scholars to understand beauty better in our world today.
