On The Concept of Beauty
A Historical Overview
This Substack is by David Perrine. I write about architecture, aesthetics, design theory, and philosophy. I share new posts bi-weekly. If you enjoy my work, please consider subscribing.
I have mentioned in previous posts that the field of architecture has a contentious relationship with the term beauty. Generally, the idea of beauty is no longer a goal for practicing architects. Today, architecture is about solving social problems, addressing climate concerns, and delivering high-quality investments for clients. Discussing beauty in architecture now seems to carry negative connotations. Those who focus solely on beauty are sometimes labeled as people who don’t care about social issues, are unrealistic about construction, or even don’t believe in climate science.
This is why most texts on aesthetics in architecture today begin with some sort of premise like, “My intention in discussing beauty is not to sideline the other goals of architecture.” This sentiment is fine to have, but I wish it didn’t feel necessary to say, and I wish the term beauty hadn’t become a kind of dog-whistle for non-progressive architects.
It seems that this condition in architecture didn’t exist in certain historic eras. For example, Rococo design principles encouraged beauty; everything could be turned into a rich formal exercise, from entire manors to small lamps. Although the conditions that allowed for Rococo aesthetic attitudes have passed, we can still learn from its values or impulses. It follows then that I see many students and professors engage in a neo-aesthetic fantasy; that is, they attempt to bring back the aesthetic values of the past using new technologies. I have personally seen this done with the Arts & Crafts, Baroque, Rococo, and Art Nouveau movements. I deeply understand this impulse. I also yearn for the freedom to engage in aesthetics freely. I just wish we didn’t have to revive these older styles to think about ornamentation. It feels that this occurs because we are uncomfortable discussing beauty in the current architectural milieu.
Much of my ‘research’ has been on aesthetic theory because I believe it is a shorted asset in architectural practice nowadays. In a previous post, I put together a reading list on the topic of aesthetics in hopes of providing resources for students or designers to engage with this topic themselves. This post can be read as an extension of that, but it is specifically a survey of the use of the word beauty.
Below is a collection of passages on the topic of beauty. The reason for my fixation with this word is that it is often used as the general adjective for a positive or pleasant aesthetic. It is ubiquitous among aesthetic theorists, and for this reason, I hope my interest in this word is not merely a tangent.
I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading.
“Well, I’ll tell you more clearly,” she said. “All of us are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and in soul, and, as soon as we come to a certain age, we naturally desire to give birth. Now no one can possibly give birth in anything ugly; only in something beautiful. That’s because when a man and a woman come together in order to give birth, this is a godly affair. Pregnancy, reproduction – this is an immortal thing for a mortal animal to do, and it cannot occur in anything that is out of harmony, but ugliness is out of harmony with all that is godly. Beauty, however, is in harmony with the divine. Therefore the goddess who presides at childbirth – she’s called Moira or Eilithuia – is really Beauty. That’s why, whenever pregnant animals or persons draw near to beauty, they become gentle and joyfully disposed and give birth and reproduce; but near ugliness they are foulfaced and draw back in pain; they turn away and shrink back and do not reproduce, and because they hold on to what they carry inside them, the labor is painful. This is the source of the great excitement about beauty that comes to anyone who is pregnant and already teeming with life: beauty releases them from their great pain. You see, Socrates,” she said, “what Love wants is not beauty, as you think it is.”
- Plato | Symposium, Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1989.
“A well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described. Again: to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude. Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either in a very minute creature, since our perception becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity; or in a creature of vast size – one, say, 1,000 miles long – as in that case, instead of the object being seen all at once, the unity and wholeness of it is lost to the beholder. Just in the same way, then, as a beautiful whole made up of parts, or a beautiful living creature, must be of some size, but a size to be taken in by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of some length, but of a length to be taken in by the memory.” - Aristotle | Poetics, translated by Ingram Bywater. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920. Public domain.
“Beauty is, then, situated over that which is shaped at the moment when, the parts having been arranged into one whole, it gives itself to the parts and to the wholes. Whenever beauty takes hold of something that is one and uniform in its parts, it gives the same thing to the whole. It is, in a way, like art, that sometimes gives beauty to a whole house along with its parts and sometimes like some nature that gives beauty to a single stone. Thus, a body comes to be beautiful by its association with an expressed principle coming from the divine [Forms].” - Plotinus | “Ennead I, vi” from Neoplatonic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, translated by John Dillon and Lloyd P. Gerson. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 2004
We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. - Plotinus | The Six Enneads, Stephen McKenna and B.S. Page (trans.), Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Publishing, 1952 [3rd century CE text].
In a similar way, then, we should seek out what is beautiful and good and ugly and evil. And first we should posit Beauty, which is the Good from which Intellect comes, which is identical with the Form of Beauty. And soul is beautiful by Intellect. Other things are beautiful as soon as they are shaped by soul, including the beauties inactions and in practices. And the bodies that are said to be beautiful are so as soon as soul makes them so. Since it is divine and, in a way, a part of beauty, it makes all that it grasps and masters beautiful insofar as it is possible for them to partake in beauty. - Plotinus | “Ennead I, vi” from Neoplatonic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, translated by John Dillon and Lloyd P. Gerson. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 2004
“Beautiful things please by proportion, and here as we have shown equality is not found only in sounds for the ear and in bodily movements, but also in visible forms, in which hitherto equality has been identified with beauty even more customarily than in sound.” - St. Augustine | De Musica, translated by W.F. Jackson Knight. London: The Orthological Institute, 1949
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiece in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is a fruitless enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. - David Hume | “Of the Standard of Taste” from Four Dissertations. 1757. Public domain.
Having endeavoured to show what beauty is not, it remains that we should examine, at least with equal attention, in what it really consists. Beauty is a thing much too affecting not to depend upon some positive qualities. And, since it is no creature of our reason, since it strikes us without any reference to use, and even where no use at all can be discerned, since the order and method of nature is generally very different from our measures and proportions, we must conclude that beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses. We ought therefore to consider attentively in what manner those sensible qualities are disposed, in such things as by experience we find beautiful, or which excite in us the passion of love, or some correspondent affection. - Edmund Burke | A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1756. Public domain.
Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. - Burke | A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Taste is the faculty for judging and object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction of dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful. - Kant | Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
That is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept. - Kant | Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end. - Kant | Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
That is beautiful which is congized without a concept as the object of a necessary satisfaction. - Kant | Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
In the subjective aspect, we call beauty that which supplies us with a particular kind of pleasure.
In the objective aspect, we call beauty something absolutely perfect, and we acknowledge it to be so only because we receive, from the manifestation of this absolute perfection, a certain kind of pleasure; so this objective definition is nothing but the subjective conception differently expressed. In reality both conceptions of beauty amount to one and the same thing—namely, the reception by us of a certain kind of pleasure; i.e., we call “beauty” that which pleases us without evoking in us desire. - Tolstoy | What is Art? and Essays on Art, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. 1899. Public domain.
We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. - Santayana | 1896, The Sense of Beauty, New York: Scribner’s
Thus in the work it is truth, not only something true, that is at work. The picture that shows the peasant shoes, the poem that says the Roman fountain, do not just make manifest what this isolated being as such is — if indeed they manifest anything at all; rather, they make unconcealedness as such happen in regard to what is as a whole. The more simply and authentically the shoes are engrossed in their nature, the more plainly and purely the fountain is engrossed in its nature — the more directly and engagingly do all beings attain to a greater degree of being along with them. That is how self-concealing being is illuminated. Light of this kind joins its shining to the work. This shining, joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.
- Heidegger | “The Origin of the Work of Art” from Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1971
After all, who shall describe Beauty? What is it? I remember tonight four beautiful things: the Cathedral at Cologne, a forest in stone, set in light and changing shadow, echoing with sunlight and solemn song; a village of the Veys in West Africa, a little thing of mauve and purple, quiet, lying content and shining in the sun; a black and velvet room where on a throne rests, in old and yellowing marble, the broken curves of the Venus de Milo; a single phrase of music in the Southern South — utter melody, haunting and appealing, suddenly arising out of night and eternity, beneath the moon.
Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal life all may have it and have it yet again. The world is full of it; and yet today the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly. This is not only wrong, it is silly. Who shall right this well-nigh universal failing? Who shall let this world be beautiful? Who shall restore to men the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep? - W.E.B. Du Bois | “Criteria of Negro Art” in The Crisis 32, October 1926’
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"Once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." The Velveteen Rabbit