Great IdeasStories, art and words
Beauty and art
What beauty is, and what art is for.
The question
What is beauty? Is it in things themselves, or in the eye of the beholder? And what is art for?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 385–370 BC
Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus
In the Symposium, Socrates describes a ladder of beauty: from one beautiful body, to all beautiful bodies, to beautiful souls, laws and knowledge, and finally to beauty itself, eternal and pure. For Plato, beauty draws the soul upward toward the truth.
c. AD 253–270 (edited by Porphyry)
Plotinus, The Six Enneads
Plotinus asks why things are beautiful. Not just because of symmetry, he says, since a single color or a simple sound can be beautiful too. Beauty is a form shining through matter, and the soul loves it because it recognizes its own home.
c. 1316–1321
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso
As Dante rises through Heaven, Beatrice grows more beautiful with each sphere, and the light grows brighter. Beauty becomes a sign of God's glory. At the end, Dante's words fail before the beauty he sees.
“His glory, by whose might all things are mov'd, Pierces the universe, and in one part Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less. ...”
published 1609
William Shakespeare, Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets praise a friend's beauty and worry that time will destroy it. Their answer is that the poem will keep that beauty alive as long as people read. Beauty fades, but art can preserve it.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”
1619
Johannes Kepler, The Harmonies of the World, Book V
Kepler finds beauty in mathematics and in the heavens. He compares the planets' speeds to musical intervals and imagines a harmony of the spheres. For him, the beauty of the cosmos showed the mind of its maker.
1790
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment
Kant says that when we call something beautiful, we mean more than 'I like it': we expect others to agree, though we can't prove it by rules. Beauty pleases freely, without serving any use. He also describes the sublime, the awe we feel before vast mountains or storms.
“The beautiful is that which pleases universally, without a concept.”
1897
Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya
Dr. Astrov plants forests and worries about their destruction. He says forests teach people about beauty and lift their minds. Chekhov lets beauty in nature stand against the dullness of the characters' lives.
“He says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments.”
1919 (English 1924)
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (in the set: The Autumn of the Middle Ages)
Huizinga describes the late Middle Ages through its colors, ceremonies, art and sounds. He shows how beauty filled everyday life, from painted books to the ringing of church bells. Art, for him, is a key to understanding a whole age.
“One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises of busy life and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity: the sound of bells.”
1940
G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
The mathematician G. H. Hardy argues that beauty is the first test of good mathematics. A beautiful proof is surprising, simple and inevitable. He compares the mathematician to a painter or a poet, a maker of patterns.
For young readers
What do you think is beautiful? A sunset, a flower, a song, a kind face? Beauty is something that makes us stop and say 'wow.'
People have argued for ages whether beauty is in the thing itself or in the eye of the person looking. Kant noticed that when we say something is beautiful, we hope others will see it too. Share something you think is beautiful with someone today.
Talk about it
- What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?
- Is beauty in the thing or in the eye of the beholder?
- Can math be beautiful? Can a good deed be beautiful?
- Why do people make art?
- Shakespeare said poems keep beauty alive. How else do we keep beautiful things?
Where else on the site
- Proportion and Scale
- Unity and Variety
- Greek Sculpture: Archaic to Classical
- Romanticism and the Sublime
- Sound: Pitch and Loudness
Every rung tagged with this idea:
- Plato: Symposium and Phaedrus
- Virgil: Eclogues and Georgics
- Plotinus: The Enneads
- Dante: Paradiso
- Shakespeare: The Tempest and the Late Plays
- Shakespeare: The Sonnets
- Kepler: The Harmonies of the World
- Kant: The Critique of Judgment
- Hardy: A Mathematician's Apology
- Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages
- Mann: Death in Venice
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.