beauty an aesthetic property commonly thought of as a species of aesthetic value. As such, it has been variously thought to be (1) a simple, indefinable property that cannot be defined in terms of any other properties; (2) a property or set of properties of an object that makes the object capable of producing a certain sort of pleasurable experience in any suitable perceiver; or (3) whatever produces a particular sort of pleasurable experience, even though what produces the experience may vary from individual to individual. It is in this last sense that beauty is thought to be ‘in the eye of the beholder.’ If beauty is a simple, indefinable property, as in (1), then it cannot be defined conceptually and has to be apprehended by intuition or taste. Beauty, on this account, would be a particular sort of aesthetic property. If beauty is an object’s capacity to produce a special sort of pleasurable experience, as in (2), then it is necessary to say what properties provide it with this capacity. The most favored candidates for these have been formal or structural properties, such as order, symmetry, and proportion. In the Philebus Plato argues that the form or essence of beauty is knowable, exact, rational, and measurable. He also holds that simple geometrical shapes, simple colors, and musical notes all have ‘intrinsic beauty,’ which arouses a pure, ‘unmixed’ pleasure in the perceiver and is unaffected by context.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many treatises were written on individual art forms, each allegedly governed by its own rules. In the eighteenth century, Hutcheson held that ‘beauty’ refers to an ‘idea raised in us,’ and that any object that excites this idea is beautiful. He thought that the property of the object that excites this idea is ‘uniformity in variety.’
Kant explained the nature of beauty by analyzing judgments that something is beautiful. Such judgments refer to an experience of the perceiver. But they are not merely expressions of personal experience; we claim that others should also have the same experience, and that they should make the same judgment (i.e., judgments that something is beautiful have ‘universal validity’). Such judgments are disinterested – determined not by any needs or wants on the part of the perceiver, but just by contemplating the mere appearance of the object. These are judgments about an object’s free beauty, and making them requires using only those mental capacities that all humans have by virtue of their ability to communicate with one another. Hence the pleasures experienced in response to such beauty can in principle be shared by anyone.
Some have held, as in (3), that we apply the term ‘beautiful’ to things because of the pleasure they give us, and not on the basis of any specific qualities an object has. Archibald Alison held that it is impossible to find any properties common to all those things we call beautiful. Santayana believed beauty is ‘pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing,’ and made no pretense that certain qualities ought to produce that pleasure.
The Greek term to kalon, which is often translated as ‘beauty’, did not refer to a thing’s autonomous aesthetic value, but rather to its ‘excellence,’ which is connected with its moral worth and/or usefulness. This concept is closer to Kant’s notion of dependent beauty, possessed by an object judged as a particular kind of thing (such as a beautiful cat or a beautiful horse), than it is to free beauty, possessed by an object judged simply on the basis of its appearance and not in terms of any concept of use. See also AESTHETIC PROPERTY, AESTHET — IC. S.L.F.