Historical+perspective+on+beauty


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Historical Perspective on Beauty **

**1.** **David Hume**, Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian is an important figure in Western philosophy, and in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment He argued that judgments about beauty are based not on facts but on feelings. In other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Have you ever bought a beautiful article of clothing, only to have someone, such as your grandmother, say that it was ugly? This is a kind of situation Hume was referring to when he said that beauty, or taste, is a matter of feeling. According to Hume, the true critic of beauty is someone who has good sense, an open mind, and a discrimination imagination. Unfortunately, this theory offers no help in identifying whose judgment – yours or that of your grandmother – was correct in assessing the beauty of the disputed article of clothing.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant disagreed with Hume, though Kant applied his idea of beauty mainly to natural objects and only secondarily to works of art. He said that people have a natural aptitude for making aesthetic judgment. In the critique of Judgment, he explained that for people to have aesthetic experiences, they must contemplate an object in a disinterested manner, disregarding its use, moral significance, and possible personal connections. Kant claimed that the formal features of an object – in particular, its harmony, unity, and balance – are most likely to trigger an aesthetic response. He believed that subject matter, emotions, and social issues are external to the artwork and have no aesthetic important. As a result, he said that it is impossible to settle arguments about taste. Much of his discussion of beauty focuses on an example of natural beauty ("this rose is beautiful"). The universality and necessity of pure judgments of taste holds for natural beauty as well as art. What is distinctive about art is that purposiveness is accompanied by some specific purpose. With fine art, that purpose is the communication of ideas. This purpose introduces a social dimension that is absent from mere entertainment. To concentrate exclusively on Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful is to encourage an overemphasis on design and thus an extreme formalism that is contrary to Kant's actual views. Kant holds that we can hardly avoid recognizing when something is art, and that it therefore demands evaluation as a thing of a certain kind (as a poem rather than a statue). Reducing art to a mere display of beautiful form would suggest that a work's content is a superfluous addition. For Kant this is only a "would-be work of fine art," manifesting taste without genius through slavish imitation, or genius without taste through undisciplined outpourings. His ideal is a work in which the form is uniquely suited to the ideas presented, so the play of form is also a "play with ideas."  **3.George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel** was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of the total reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental Philosophy and Marxism. He claimed that aesthetics is about the beauty of art rather than about natural beauty. He said that art is more than a representation of the natural world. It expresses a human idea of the world. The beauty of art lies in presenting ideas in sensuous from. He said that beauty is his proposal that true is beauty is a construct of the human mind and can therefore be found only in humans and their artworks. As a result, he believed that nature cannot be aesthetically beautiful. Works of art that show the many forms of human consciousness and represent the subjective act of perception and human vision were, for Hegel, the most beautiful.
 * 2.** **Immanuel Kant: a dissenting perspective**