Beauty...

Greeks where especially fascinated by the notion of beauty.They even tried to explain our desire for it through mythology, creating stories like that of Aphrodite.She emerges from the waves nude, but does not present herself to the gods the way. Her attendants ,the Horae and the Charities who welcome her, bathe her in fragrant oils, brush her hair and dress her in pretty clothes and jewelry before presenting her to Zeus, the father of the Gods. The beautiful and the desirable, therefore is not expressed only by the attractive physical appearance,but also by grooming and by finery.

The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as  Hume, Kant, Schiller, Hegel. “Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite,” said the historian George Bancroft.

Is beauty universal?

How do we know it?

How can we predispose ourselves to embrace it?

Nearly every major philosopher has engaged with these questions and their cognates, including the great figures of ancient Greek philosophy such as Plato and Aristotle. Suppose we agree that Michelangelo’s David and a Van Gogh’s self-portrait are beautiful. Do such beauties have something in common? Is there a single shared quality, beauty, that we experience in both of them? And is this beauty the very same that one experiences when gazing at the Grand Canyon from its edge or listening to Beethoven’s ninth symphony? Beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things?  Is there an answer to the question “what is most beautiful”

No single answer to all this question. Each of us is free to determine what is beautiful to us. In the end, we always return to the wisdom of Protagoras who said that

“man is the measurement of all things.”