Beauty is widely defined as a subjective, aesthetic quality of things which makes these things pleasurable to see. These things may include sunsets, landscapes, beautiful people and beautiful works of art. Beauty, along with personal taste and art, is perhaps the most important area of aesthetics, among the major branches of aesthetics. It encompasses all the areas of human experience from the biological, physical, cultural, and social aspects.
The word “beauty” has various different meanings. For some it is merely a form of aesthetic appreciation, while for others it is an emotional synonym for tenderness, love, care, and virtue. Modern aesthetics has been divided into two major branches: aesthetics of the visual nature and aesthetics of man. Man’s aesthetic passions are mostly directed towards the visual sense. However, even his highly developed faculties can be affected by man’s aesthetic passions, sometimes to the point of causing him pain.
The major branch of aesthetic study is called the art of beauty. It comprises works of arts which have universal significance as well as particular significance for its own culture. According to this school of thought, beauty is not a purely subjective good, but is a complex, integrated whole which can be appreciated in the totality of human experience. It is a concept, not a simple emotion. According to the most eminent philosophers and aestheticians, there are three basic principles on which beauty is based. These are unity, contrast and proportion.
Unity can be understood simply as the beauty principle which states that the parts of any whole are as good as the whole itself, i.e., each part contributes to its existence, while the whole cannot exist without the other parts. Contrasting aesthetics with philosophy of language, it can be explained as the unity principle of modern aesthetics: the aesthetic world is composed of wholesome pictures and verbal descriptions of those wholesome pictures. In this way, unity and contrast are the basic principles of modern aesthetics.
The third and most important principle of beauty is proportion, the idea that each part of an artistic composition corresponds to a proportion of the whole. Aesthetics as a philosophical study has not presented a complete system of aesthetic values. In fact, the subject of beauty itself poses many problems, the solution of which lies in the ability of man to combine and blend elements from different fields and in order to create a new and pure aesthetic experience.
Modern aesthetics therefore constitutes an important philosophical problem, the solution of which will play a decisive role in the shaping of beauty in our society. This is why we need to find other ways to express beauty than through beauty products and beauty practices. We should also search for ways in which beauty can become beautiful without damaging our social media presence or destroying the integrity of our environment. Beauty is the state of being beautiful, thus beauty is beauty.