Beauty. Objectivism and subjectivism History of western philosophy Eurocentrism and beauty

Classical

The classical conception defines beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole.^[3][5][9] On this account, which found its most explicit articulation in the Italian Renaissance, the beauty of a human body, for example, depends, among other things, on the right proportion of the different parts of the body and on the overall symmetry.^[3] One problem with this conception is that it is difficult to give a general and detailed description of what is meant by "harmony between parts".^[3] This raises the suspicion that defining beauty through harmony only results in exchanging one unclear term for another one. Some attempts have been made to dissolve this suspicion by searching for laws of beauty, like the golden ratio. Alexander Baumgarten, for example, saw laws of beauty in analogy with laws of nature and believed that they could be discovered through empirical research.^[5] But these attempts have failed so far to find a general definition of beauty. Several authors even take the opposite claim, that such laws cannot be formulated, as part of their definition of beauty.^[10]