About Theories About Beauty

Beauty is defined as the beauty of things that makes these things pleasurable to see. Such things as sunsets, landscapes, beautiful humans and great works of art are considered to be beauty. Beauty, along with beauty and art, is the most important subject of aesthetics, another of the major branches of psychology. The term ‘beauty’ has two meanings. One of these is emotional beauty which may be expressed in terms of the appearance of a person while the other meaning is purely intellectual.

Aesthetic beauty is based on an individual’s point of view. It is subjective because it is the beauty based on the person’s own tastes and feelings. Beauty is not based on any one criteria and beauty depends on the various combinations of different criteria. For example, the physical attractiveness of a person might be balanced by the mental attractiveness but still both are beauty.

There are two types of beauty, the positive aesthetic value of a thing and its negative qualities. The aesthetic value of a thing refers to how beautiful it is and the positive aesthetic value of a person refers to how pleasing the person is to others. Thus beauty in the sense of aesthetic value has two aspects – one is beauty itself and the second is the pleasing effect it has on others. The pleasing effect is what we call the aesthetic quality of a thing. This quality may be expressed by a physical trait or by some aesthetic quality such as facial expression, bodily movement, or tonality.

Some philosophers have defined beauty as something that is seen, felt, smelled, tasted, and even felt, but not defined. Others have defined beauty as something that is common to all cultures and societies, independently of individual identities. Still others have defined beauty as something that lies beyond all understanding and therefore not subject to change. These definitions exclude all variations and only emphasize the universal and internal attributes of beauty.

The beauty which we see in others and in ourselves can be described in terms of three dimensions of the aesthetic experience objective beauty, subjective beauty, and dazed beauty. Objective beauty refers to the beauty which is found in the eyes of the beholder; subjective beauty refers to the beauty which is perceived by the person for whom an object exists; and dazed beauty refers to the beauty that is perceived by those who cannot see an object. Subjective and objective beauty therefore overlap and sometimes contradict each other, and the nature of beauty is necessarily uncertain. We all possess some subjective beauty, and our ideas of beauty are also subjective. However, this beauty, while necessary to the operation of society, cannot be measured in money nor power, and so it is not a commodity.

Dazed beauty is beauty in a state of incomplete understanding or unfamiliarity with its object. While beauty exists in the mind of the beholder, these theories do not tell how to know what beauty is. These theories about beauty are, therefore, incomplete.