essay of beauty of science

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What Role Does Beauty Have in the World of Science?

What is meant by “beauty” in science, how it can be studied and what are the implications of such research.

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Beauty might not necessarily be the first word that comes to mind when we think about research, but as Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan’s work highlights, it plays a crucial role in the flourishing of scientists.

Vaidyanathan is an associate professor, chair of the department of sociology and director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. His research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial and scientific institutions. Currently, Vaidyanathan leads Work and Well-Being in Science , the largest cross-national study investigating factors that affect the wellbeing of scientists.

While there isn’t an official term that describes this research field just yet, Vaidyanathan feels inclined to call it “aesthetics in science”: “There is a very recent and growing body of work in philosophy and sociology that looks at how aesthetic factors (e.g., beauty, awe, wonder and other aesthetic emotions) shape scientists and the practice of science,” he says.

In this interview with Technology Networks , Vaidyanathan describes what is meant by “beauty” in science, how it can be studied and the implications of such research.

Molly Campbell (MC): Can you talk about how you became interested in this research field?

Brandon Vaidyanathan (BV): I was drawn to research this area because in qualitative research interviews with scientists for a previous project, our team was surprised to hear them regularly bring up “beauty” as a key motivating factor. There is also new research that is raising concerns about how the pursuit of “mathematical beauty” in physics can be a source of bias that is derailing scientific progress.

MC: Can you talk about the current research landscape exploring the role of beauty in science, and what actionable insights it offers?

BV: My project Work and Well-Being in Science is the largest international study on the aesthetics of science. We surveyed several thousand scientists in 4 countries and also conducted 200+ in-depth interviews.

One key insight is that aesthetic factors are a major source of motivation for scientists to pursue their careers in the first place.

Our team finds that most scientists see science as an aesthetic quest – a quest for the “beauty of understanding,” which is the pleasure gained from discovering the hidden order or inner logic underlying phenomena they study.

We also find that aesthetic experience is very strongly associated with well-being among scientists. This is especially important in light of considerable research pointing to a mental health crisis in science. Our work underscores the need to preserve the intrinsic motivations and joys of doing science and address the obstacles to it (such as institutional pressures and toxic leadership) that scientists face.

Read Vaidyanathan’s published work on exploring aesthetics in science:

• Aesthetic experiences and flourishing in science: A four-country study
• Individual differences in scientists’ aesthetic disposition, aesthetic experiences, and aesthetic sensitivity in scientific work
• Beauty in biology: An empirical assessment

Besides this project, the work of Cambridge philosopher Dr. Milena Ivanova highlights the importance of aesthetics in scientific experiments in her books and articles. Prominent scientists such as Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins have written books about aesthetics in science ( A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design and Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder ). Sabine Hossenfelder published a bestselling book on the negative aspects of mathematical beauty in physics.

MC: Can it be challenging to explore the role of beauty in science?

BV: The challenge to survey research in this area is that it is increasingly difficult to get a high response rate for surveys – even with financial incentives in place, most people don’t want to take a survey, and mail servers often filter out survey invitations as spam. It is also difficult to get elite populations (e.g., scientists) to participate in research. We think increased dissemination of our results and awareness of our findings can help motivate scientists to continue participating in research so we can learn how to improve well-being in the scientific community.

MC: Are there any specific research methodologies that you view as integral to the progression of this field?

BV: So far the work that has been done is either philosophical, historical or sociological (through interviews and surveys). Longitudinal survey work would be important in order to assess causal mechanisms. More experimental and even neuropsychological work could also benefit this field in helping us understand how aesthetic experiences affect scientists and their relevance to scientific practice.

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan was speaking with Molly Campbell, Senior Science Writer for Technology Networks.

About the interviewee:

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is associate professor, chair of the Department of Sociology and director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a PhD in sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Vaidyanathan's research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial and scientific institutions, and has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals. His current research examines the role of beauty in science and other domains of work.

February 2, 2021

How the Brain Responds to Beauty

Scientists search for the neural basis of an enigmatic experience

By Jason Castro

Andriy Onufriyenko Getty Images

Pursued by poets and artists alike, beauty is ever elusive. We seek it in nature, art and philosophy but also in our phones and furniture. We value it beyond reason, look to surround ourselves with it and will even lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it. As philosopher George Santayana observed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty , there is within us “a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it.”

Philosophers such as Santayana have tried for centuries to understand beauty, but perhaps scientists are now ready to try their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, perhaps it can tell us where it is—or where it isn’t. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and their colleagues examined the origin of beauty and argued that it is as enigmatic in our brain as it is in the real world.

There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion to the golden ratio (if you’re curious, that ratio is about 1.6:1).

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At the time, Fechner was immersed in the project of “outer psychophysics ”—the search for mathematical relationships between stimuli and their resultant percepts. What both fascinated and eluded him, however, was the much more difficult pursuit of “inner psychophysics”—relating the states of the nervous system to the subjective experiences that accompany them. Despite his experiments with the golden ratio, Fechner continued to believe that beauty was, to a large degree, in the brain of the beholder.

So what part of our brain responds to beauty? The answer depends on whether we see beauty as a single category at all. Brain scientists who favor the idea of such a “beauty center” have hypothesized that it may live in the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or the insula. If this theory prevails, then beauty really could be traced back to a single region of the brain. We would experience beauty in the same way whether we were listening to Franz Schubert song, staring at a Diego Velázquez painting or seeing a doe denning under the starlight.

If the idea of a beauty center is correct, then this would be a considerable victory for theory of functional localization. Under this view—which is both widely held and widely contested—much of what the brain does is the result of highly specialized modules. To simplify the idea a bit, we could imagine assigning Post-it notes to areas of the brain with job descriptions underneath: “pleasure center,” “memory center,” “visual center,” “beauty center.” While some version of this theory is likely true, it’s certainly not the case that any kind of mental state you can describe or intuit is cleanly localized somewhere in the brain. Still, there is excellent evidence, for example, that specific parts of the visual cortex have an exquisite selectivity for motion. Other, nonoverlapping parts are quite clearly activated only by faces. But for every careful study that finds compellingly localized brain function, there are many more that have failed to match a region with a concrete job description.

Rather than potentially add to the mix of inconclusive, underpowered studies about whether the perception of beauty is localized to some specific brain area in their recent investigation, the Tsinghua University researchers opted to do a meta-analysis. They pooled data from many already published studies to see if a consistent result emerged. The team first combed the literature for all brain-imaging studies that investigated people’s neural responses to visual art and faces and that also asked them to report on whether what they saw was beautiful or not. After reviewing the different studies, the researchers were left with data from 49 studies in total, representing experiments from 982 participants. The faces and visual art were taken to be different kinds of beautiful things, and this allowed for a conceptually straightforward test of the beauty center hypothesis. If transcendent, capital-B beauty was really something common to faces and visual art and was processed in the capital-B-beauty region of the brain, then this area should show up across studies, regardless of the specific thing being seen as beautiful. If no such region was found, then faces and visual art would more likely be, as parents say of their children, each beautiful in its own way.

The technique used to analyze the pooled data is known as activation likelihood estimation (ALE). Underneath a bit of statistical formality, it is an intuitive idea: we have more trust in things that have more votes. ALE takes each of the 49 studies to be a fuzzy, error-prone report of a specific location in the brain—roughly speaking, the particular spot that “lit up” when the experiment was conducted, together with a surrounding cloud of uncertainty. The size of this cloud of uncertainty was large if the study had few participants and small if there were many of them, thus modeling the confidence that comes from collecting more data. These 49 points and their clouds were then all merged into a composite statistical map, giving an integrated picture of brain activation across many studies and a means for saying how confident we are in the consensus across experiments. If a single small region was glowing red-hot after the merge (all clouds were small and close together), that would mean it was reliably activated across all the different studies.

Performing this analysis, the research team found that beautiful visual art and beautiful faces each reliably elicited activity in well-defined brain regions. No surprises here: it is hoped that the brain is doing something when you’re looking at a visual stimulus. The regions were almost completely nonoverlapping, however, which challenged the idea that a common beauty center was activated. If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium.

It’s possible the hypothesized beauty center actually does exist and just failed to show up for a variety of methodological reasons. And to be sure, this one analysis hardly settles a question as profound and difficult as this one. Yet that raises an important point: What are we trying to accomplish here? Why do we care if beauty is one thing in the brain or 10? Would the latter make beauty 10 times more marvelous or diminish it 10-fold? More pertinent: How do we understand beauty differently if we know where to point to it in the brain? It will probably be many years, perhaps even generations, before we have something like a neuroscience of aesthetics that both physiologists and humanists will find truly compelling. But we can be sure that beauty’s seductions will keep calling us back to this messy, intriguing and unmapped place in the interim.

Jason Castro is an associate professor and chair of the neuroscience program at Bates College.

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The meaning of beauty in exact natural science.

Lecture delivered to the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste

When a representative of natural science has to address a session of the Academy of the Fine Arts, he can hardly dare to express opinions about the topic art. For the arts are clearly remote from his own area of work. But perhaps he is entitled to take up the problem of beauty. For the adjective 'beautiful' is here indeed used to characterize the arts, but the realm of beauty reaches certainly far beyond its sphere of action. It surely encompasses also other areas of spiritual life – and the beauty of nature finds itself reflected also in the beauty of natural science.  Perhaps it is good if we at first – without any attempt at a philosophical analysis of the concept 'beauty' – simply inquire where, in the area of the exact sciences, we can meet with beauty itself. Here I may perhaps begin with a personal experience. When I, as a young boy, was attending the lowest classes of the Max-Gymnasium in Munich, I took a great interest in numbers. It gave me pleasure to know their properties – for instance, to find out whether they were prime numbers or not, and to see whether they could be represented as sums of squares, or finally to prove that there had to be infinitely many prime numbers. Since my father found my knowledge of Latin much more important than my interest in numbers, he once brought to me from the State Library a treatise written in Latin by the mathematician Kronecker. In it the properties of numbers were put in relation to the geometric problem which consists in dividing a circle into a number of equal parts. I do not know how my father hit upon such a research from the middle of the past century. But the study of Kronecker's treatise made a profound impression on me. For I perceived it immediately as a thing of beauty that one could, from the problem of the division of the circle – whose simplest cases were already known to us from the classroom – come to learn something about the completely different questions of the elementary theory of numbers. In the distant background the question even presented itself briefly whether there are integers and geometric forms – that is, whether they exist outside the spirit of man, or whether they are just constructed by this spirit as instruments for the understanding of the world.  But at that time I was not yet in a position to think of such problems. Only the impression of something very beautiful was quite direct, did not need any foundation or explanation.  But what was beautiful here? Already in antiquity there were two definitions of beauty which stood in a certain opposition to each other. The controversy between these two definitions played a great role especially in the Renaissance. One of them designates beauty as the right concordance of the parts with each other and with the whole. The other, which goes back to Plotinus, without any reference to parts designates beauty as the translucence of the eternal splendor of the 'One' through the material phenomenon. In connection with the mathematical example we will have at first to side with the first definition. The parts are here the properties of the integers and the laws of geometric constructions. The whole is obviously the mathematical system of axioms which stands behind them, to which both arithmetic and Euclidean geometry belong. Namely, it is the great interconnection which is guaranteed by the freedom from contradiction of the axiomatic system. We realize that the single parts fit together, that they belong to this whole really as parts – and we, without any reflection, perceive as beautiful the compactness and simplicity of this axiomatic system. Beauty has therefore something to do with the age-old problem of the 'One' and the 'Many' which – once in strict connection with the problem of 'Being' and 'Becoming'– stood at the center of the early Greek philosophy. 

Since also the roots of exact natural science lie precisely in this area, it will be good to sketch the thought currents of that early epoch in rough outline. At the start of Greek philosophy there is the question of the fundamental principle – of the 'One' – out of which the manifold multiplicity of the phenomena can be made understandable. Although it may sound strange to us, the well-known answer by Thales – "Water is the material principle of all things"– contains, as Nietzsche has pointed out, three basic philosophical challenges that became important in the subsequent development. They are, first, that man should seek such a unitary fundamental principle; second, that the answer could be given only rationally, that is, without reference to a myth; and finally, third, that the material aspect of the world had here a decisive role to play. Behind these challenges stands naturally the tacit admission that understanding can always just mean one thing: to become aware of interconnections, i.e. unitary features, characteristics of relatedness, in the multiplicity.  If, however, there is such a unitary principle of all things, then is one unavoidably driven to the question – and this is the next step in this conceptual development – as to how change can be made understandable out of it. The difficulty is particularly to be seen in the famous paradox of Parmenides. Only being is, non-being is not. But, if only being is, then there can be nothing besides being-something, that is, that would dismember this being, that would bring about changes. Therefore being should be thought of as eternal, uniform, temporally and spatially unlimited. The changes that we experience, then, could only be an appearance. Greek thought could not stand still long because of this paradox. The eternal succession of phenomena was immediately given, and people had to explain it. In the attempt to overcome this difficulty, various directions were tried by various philosophers. One development led to the atomic doctrine of Democritos. We want to cast just a very quick look upon it. Besides being, also non-being can be there as possibility, namely as possibility for motion and form – that is, as empty space. Being is repeatable, and thus we come to the view of atoms in empty space – the view which later became so endlessly fruitful as a foundation of natural science. But of this development we are not going to speak here any further. Rather the other development will be more precisely discussed: the one which led to the ideas of Plato and which brings us directly to the problem of beauty. This development begins in the school of Pythagoras. In it must the idea have arisen that mathematics – mathematical orderliness – was the fundamental principle out of which the multiplicity of phenomena could be made understandable. About Pythagoras himself we know little. It seems that his school was somehow like a religious sect. What can be traced back to Pythagoras with certainty is only the doctrine of metempsychosis and the establishment of religious-ethical prescriptions and prohibitions. In this school, however, the occupation with music and mathematics played an important part – and this was the decisive element for future time. In this connection Pythagoras must have made the famous discovery that equally tense vibrating strings produce a harmonic sound if their lengths stand to each other in a simple rational numeric relation. Mathematical structure, namely rational numeric relation as source of harmony – that was certainly one of the most pregnant discoveries that were ever made in the history of mankind. The harmonic resonance of two strings produces a beautiful sound. The human ear perceives the dissonance that originates from the disquiet of oscillations as disturbing – but it perceives the quiet of harmony, the consonance, as beautiful. The mathematical relation was therefore also the source of beauty. Beauty is – so reads one of the ancient definitions – the right concordance of the parts with each other and with the whole. The parts are here the individual tunes, the whole is the harmonic sound. Mathematical relation can then join together into one whole two originally independent parts and thus bring forth something beautiful. It was this discovery which, in the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, produced a breakthrough toward entirely new forms of thought. It led to the view that the principle of all being was no longer seen as a sensible stuff – as water was for Thales – but as an ideal form. Thereby was a fundamental thought expressed which later constituted the foundation of all exact natural sciences. Aristotle reports in his Metaphysics about the Pythagoreans: "They busied themselves at first with mathematics, promoted it and, being reared in it, considered mathematical principles as the principles of everything that exists. And seeing in the numbers the properties and foundations of harmony ... they conceived the elements of numbers as the elements of all things, and the entire universe as harmony and number.'' The understanding of the manifold multiplicity of phenomena, then, should come about through our recognizing, in it, unitary formal principles which can be expressed in the language of mathematics. Thus also a strict interconnection is established between intelligibility and beauty. For, if beauty is known as the concordance of the parts with each other and with the whole and if, on the other hand, all understanding can first come about through this formal interconnection – then is the experience of beauty almost identical with the experience of understanding or, at least, guessing such an interconnection. 

The next step in this development was undertaken, as is well known, by Plato through the formulation of his doctrine of ideas. Plato contrasts the perfect mathematical forms with the imperfect entities of the sensible world – for instance, the imperfectly circular orbits of the stars with the perfect, mathematically defined circle. Material things are the imitations, the shadows of ideal real structures.  And thus – we would be tempted to continue – these ideal structures are real because and insofar as they are realizing in material events. Plato, then, distinguishes here with complete clarity a bodily being which is accessible to the senses from a purely ideal being which cannot be grasped through the senses but only through spiritual acts. However, this ideal being stands by no means in need of human thinking, so as to be brought about by it. It is, on the contrary, the authentic being after which both the corporeal world and the human thinking are patterned. The grasping of the ideas by the human spirit is – as already their name says – more of an artistic contemplation, a half conscious guessing than a rational knowing. It is the reminiscence of forms which have engrafted into this soul already before its earthly existence. The central idea is that of beauty and goodness, in which the divinity becomes visible, and at whose sight the wings of the soul grow. In one passage of the Phaedros is the thought expressed: “The soul is frightened, it shudders at the sight of beauty for it feels that something is conjured up in it which has not come to it from the outside through the senses, but has always been present in it, in a profoundly unconscious area”. 

But let us return again to the understanding and therefore to natural science. The manifold multiplicity of phenomena can be understood – say Plato and Pythagoras – because and insofar as here there are underlying unitary formal principles which are amenable to a mathematical representation. With that, the entire program of modern exact natural science is already anticipated. But it could not be carried out in antiquity because the empirical knowledge of details in natural events was largely lacking. The first attempt to come to grips with such details was undertaken, as is well known, by the philosophy of Aristotle. But, given the boundless fulness which at first sight offered itself to the observer of nature, and given the total lack of any viewpoints which could have made orderliness recognizable, the unitary formal principles which had been sought by Pythagoras and Plato had now to step back before the description of details. Thus already at that time comes to the fore the opposition which has lasted until now, for instance in the discussion between experimental and theoretical physics. It is the opposition between the experimentalist who, through accurate and conscientious spade work, creates the presuppositions for the understanding of nature and the theoretician who devises mathematical schemes by which he tries to order nature and thus to understand it. These mathematical schemes prove themselves to be the true ideas which underlie natural events – and this not only because they represent correctly the data of experience but above all because of their simplicity and beauty. Already Aristotle, as an experimentalist spoke critically of the Pythagoreans who, as he put it: “did not search for explanations and theories on the basis of facts, but rather, on the basis of certain theories and pet opinions, strained the facts and – so to speak – played themselves up as co-ordinators of the universe." Looking back at the history of exact natural science one can perhaps establish that the correct representation of natural phenomena developed precisely out of the tension between these two opposite conceptions. Pure mathematical speculation is sterile because it cannot find its way back from the fulness of possible forms to the very few forms according to which nature is really constructed. And pure experimentation is sterile because finally it is smothered by endless tabulations without intrinsic interconnection. Only from the tension that arises out of the interplay between the fulness of facts and the possibly suitable mathematical forms can decisive advances come. 

But this tension could not be taken up in antiquity and therefore the way to knowledge became for long time separated from the way to beauty. The meaning of beauty for the understanding of nature became clearly visible again only when people, at the beginning of modern times, succeeded in reverting from Aristotle to Plato. Only through this turn did the entire fruitfulness of the mental attitude introduced by Pythagoras and Plato reveal itself. Already the famous investigations of the fall – which Galilei did probably not carry out at the Leaning Tower of Pisa – indicate that most clearly.  Galilei begins with accurate observations without taking into account the authority of Aristotle. Rather he tries, following the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato, to find mathematical forms that correspond to the empirically obtained facts, and thus arrives at his laws of the fall. But in order to recognize the beauty of mathematical forms in the phenomena, he must – and this is a decisive point – idealize the facts or, as Aristotle had reproachfully put it, strain them.  Aristotle had taught that all moving bodies come finally to rest if there is no action by external forces – and that was the common experience. Galilei asserts on the contrary that bodies without external forces persevere in the state of uniform motion. Galilei could dare to strain facts this way because he could point out that moving bodies are always exposed to the resistance of friction – and so motion lasts in actual fact the longer, the better the friction forces can be eliminated. Through this straining of facts – this idealization – he gained a simple mathematical law: and this was beginning of the modern exact natural science. 

A few years later Kepler succeeded in discovering – in the results of Tycho Brahe's very precise observations of planetary orbits – new mathematical forms. Thus he formulated his famous three Keplerian laws. How close Kepler felt in these discoveries to the old conceptions of Pythagoras, and how much the beauty of the interconnections led him to their formulation – this comes to the fore already in the fact that he compared the revolutions of planets around the sun to the vibrations of a string, and spoke of a harmonious resonance of the various planetary orbits: the harmony of the spheres. Finally, at the end of his work on the harmony of the world he burst into the cry of joy: "I thank you, God our Creator, for you have made me gaze upon the beauty of your creative work." Kepler was intimately seized by the fact that he had here come across a quite central interconnection: one not thougt out by man, and one whose first cognition had been reserved for him – an interconnection of highest beauty. 

A few decades later Isaac Newton in England brought this interconnection completely to light and described it in detail in his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica . With that was the path of exact natural science marked out for about two centuries. But, is it not knowledge alone that is in question here – or also beauty? And if beauty, too, is in question what role has it played in the discovery of interconnections? Let us recall again the ancient definition: "Beauty is the right concordance of the parts with each other and with the whole." That this criterion applies in the highest measure to a construction like Newtonian mechanics, this hardly needs to be explained.  The parts – they are the individual mechanical processes: those which we isolate accurately by means of apparatus just as those which unfold inextricably before us in the manifold play of phenomena. And the whole is precisely the unitary formal principle into which all of these processes fit the one which has been mathematically laid down by Newton in a simple system of axioms. Unitariness and simplicity are, to be sure, not exactly the same. But the fact that in such a theory the many are placed over against the one, that in the one the many are unified – this leads by itself to the consequence that the theory is simultaneously perceived by us as simple and beautiful. The meaning of beauty for the finding out of truth has been recognized and stressed at all times. The Latin motto, "simplex sigillum veri" , "Simplicity is the seal of truth" stands in large letters in the physics auditorium of the University of Gottingen as a warning for those who want to discover something new. And the other Latin motto "pulchritudo splendor veritatis" , "beauty is the splendor of truth" can also be so interpreted that the researcher first knows truth from his splendor shining forth. Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language. But we do not want to follow any further the evolution of history. Rather we would like to ask quite directly: What shines up here? How does it happen that in this shining-up of beauty in exact natural science the great interconnection becomes cognoscible –even before it can be understood in detail, before it can be demonstrated rationally? What does the shining force consist in and what does it accomplish in the further course of science? 

Perhaps at this point one should begin by recalling a phenomenon which can be called the unfolding of abstract structures. It can be clarified through the example of the theory of numbers which has already been mentioned at the beginning, but one can also point to similar processes in the development of art. For the mathematical foundation of arithmetic – the theory of numbers – a few simple axioms suffice which, properly speaking, just define exactly what counting means. But, with these few axioms, is in fact already laid down the entire fulness of forms that only in the course of a long history have entered the consciousness of mathematicians: the doctrine of prime numbers, that of square rests, that of the congruence of numbers, etc. One can say that those abstract structures, which are laid down by counting, have unfolded visibly only in the course of the history of mathematics – that is, history has brought to the fore the fulness of theorems and interconnections which make up the contents of that complicated science which is the theory of numbers. In a similar way, also at the beginning of an art style, for instance in architecture, certain simple basic forms are found, e.g. the semicircle and the square in the Romanesque architecture. Out of these basic forms emerge – in the course of history – new, more complicated, even changed forms which, however, can in some way be conceived as variations on the same theme. Thus, from such basic structures, a new manner, a new style of construction is developed. One has the feeling that the possibilities of development could be detected in these primordial forms already at the beginning. Otherwise it would be hardly understandable that many gifted artists decided quite rapidly to pursue these new possibilities.

A similar unfolding of abstract basic structures has doubtlessly taken place also in the cases I have enumerated concerning the history of the exact natural sciences. This growth, the development of continually new branches has lasted, in the case of Newtonian mechanics, until the middle of the past century. In our century we have experienced something similar in the theory of relativity and in the quantum theory – and the growth is not yet completed. Incidentally, this process has also – in science as well as in art – an important social and ethical aspect. For many persons can actively participate in it. When in the Middle Ages a large cathedral had to be built, many architects and craftsmen were employed. They were filled with the perspective of the beauty which was laid down in the primordial forms, and were obliged, by their very task, to perform precisely accurate work in the spirit of such forms.  In a similar way, during the two centuries that followed Newton's discovery many mathematicians, physicists and technicians had the task of treating individual mechanical problems according to the Newtonian methods, or of carrying out experiments or of undertaking technical applications. And here, too, always the greatest accuracy was demanded in order to attain whatever was possible within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. Perhaps one may say in general that through the underlying structures – in this case, Newtonian mechanics – guidelines are drawn or even value standards set according to which it can be objectively determined whether a given task has been performed rightly or wrongly. Just because of the fact that here precise requirements can be established, that the individual can co-operate – through little contributions – to the attainment of great goals, that an objective decision can be made about the value of his contribution: from all of this the satisfaction arises which actually flows, from such a development, to the large circle of the persons involved. Consequently, one should also not underrate the ethical significance of technology for the present time. 

Out of the development of natural science and technology has come forth, for instance, also the idea of the airplane. The individual technician who constructs any partial gear for the airplane – and the worker who produces it – knows that everything hinges on the extreme precision and accuracy of his work, that perhaps even the lives of many persons depend on its reliability. Consequently, he gains the pride which a job well done warrants. And he rejoices with us at the beauty of the airplane when he perceives that, in it, the technological goal has been implemented with the rightly suitable means. Beauty is – so runs the already repeatedly quoted ancient definition – the right concordance of the parts with each other and with the whole. But this requirement must also be fulfilled in a good airplane. But, by this reference to the development of a beautiful basic structure – and to the ethical values and requirements which later emerge in the historical course of such a development – the question posed before is still not yet answered. What shines up in such structures so that the great interconnection can be known, even before it is rationally understood in detail? By the way, the possibility should be excluded in advance that such a knowing may be subject to illusions. But that there is this immediate knowing, this fright in front of beauty – as Plato put in the Phaedros – it cannot be doubted at all. Among all those who have had investigated this question there seems to be a consensus that such an immediate knowing does not take place through discursive, that is, rational thinking. I would like to cite here at some length two statements. One is by Johannes Kepler of whom we have spoken before. The other, from our own time, is due to the atomic physicist of Zurich, Wolfgang Pauli, who was a friend of the psychologist C. G. Jung. The first text is to be found in Kepler's work Cosmic Harmony and reads: "That power which notices and knows the noble proportions in sensible objects and in other external things has to be ascribed to the lower region of the soul. It is very close to the power which provides the senses with their formal schemes or, even more deeply, to the purely vital power of the soul. It does not think in discursive way, that is deductively – as philosophers do – and does not employ any lofty method. Therefore it is not proper to man but also inheres in the wild beasts and domestic cattle ... One could then ask from what source that soul power which has no share in conceptual thinking and therefore also no proper cognition of harmonic relations may have the ability to know what is there, in the external world. For to know means to compare that which can be outwardly noticed through the senses with the inward primordial images and thus judge its concordance with them. Proclos has, in this connection, a very beautiful expression by using the image of waking up from a dream. The sensible things of the external world bring back to our memory those things which we have perceived before in the dream. In the same way the mathematical relationships which are present in sensible reality conjure up those intelligible primordial images which are inwardly present in advance. As a result they now shine up in the soul, efficaciously and vivaciously, while before they were present only in a nebulous way. But how have they penetrated to the interior of man? To this I answer – Kepler goes on to say – that all pure ideas or primordial formal relationships concerning the harmony of which we have been speaking inhabit interiorly those who have a capacity to apprehend them. But they are not first taken into the interior of man through a conceptual process. Rather they stem from one, as it were, instinctive and pure contemplation of sublimity. They are innate in these individuals, just as the morphological principle of plants – for instance, concerning the number of petals or the number of seed receptacles for the apple – is innate." 

Kepler, then, indicates here possibilities that may be already present in the animal and vegetable realms, namely inborn primordial images which bring about the cognition of forms. In our time Portmann, in particular, has discussed such possibilities. He describes for instance certain colorful patterns which are embodied in the plumage of birds and which can have a biological sense only if they are noticed by other birds of the same kind. The ability to notice, therefore, must be inborn just as the pattern itself.  Here one can also think of the singing of birds. At first what is biologically required here is only a definite acoustic signal which serves, for instance, in the search for a mate and is understood by the mate itself. But in the measure that the immediate biological function decreases in importance, it may happen that the treasure of forms – namely, the underlying melodic structure – can acquire a playful enlargement and development. This then, as song, enraptures also such a biologically unrelated being as man. The ability to recognize the play of such forms must, in any case, be inborn in the bird species involved – it certainly stands in no need of discursive rational thinking. As regards man, to cite another example, he has probably the ability inborn to understand certain basic forms of gesticulation and to decide accordingly whether his neighbor harbors friendly or hostile intentions – an ability which is of the greatest significance for the social life of people. 

Ideas similar to those of Kepler are expressed in an essay by Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli writes: "The process of understanding in nature – as well as the delight that man feels in the act of understanding, that is, when he becomes aware of a new cognition – seems therefore to consist in a correspondence, a coming-to-cover-each-other: pre-existing internal images of the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. This conception of the knowledge of nature goes back to Plato, as is well known, and ... is also advocated very clearly by Kepler. He speaks in fact of ideas which pre-exist in the spirit of God and are created with the soul because of its being the image of God. These primordial images which the soul can perceive with the help of an inborn instinct Kepler calls archetypal.  The agreement with the primordial images or archetypes which C. G. Jung has introduced into modern psychology as instincts of the active imagination is quite far-reaching. Modern psychology gives the proof that every understanding is a lengthy process which is attended by unconscious processes long before the consciousness content is capable of rational expression. By so doing, psychology has again directed the attention to the preconscious archaic stage of knowledge. At this stage, instead of clear concepts, images are present with a strong emotional content. They are not thought but so to speak, contemplated pictorially. The archetypes function as ordering operators and shapers of this world of symbolic images. They act as the sought-for bridge between sense perceptions and ideas and therefore are also a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of a scientific theory. However, one must beware of transposing this a priori of knowledge into the field of consciousness and relate it to definite ideas which can be formulated rationally." 

In addition Pauli discusses in the further course of his researches, the fact the Kepler came to the conviction about the rightness of the Copernican system not primarily because of detailed results of astronomical observations. Rather, what moved him was the correspondence of the Copernican image with an archetype – which C. G. Jung calls  Mandala  – that Kepler employs also as a symbol of the holy Trinity.  God stands in the center of a sphere as the First Mover. The world, in which the Son is at work, is compared to the surface of the sphere. The Holy Spirit corresponds to the rays that run from the center to the surface of the sphere. Naturally, it belongs to the essence of such primordial images that they cannot be described in a precisely rational way. Even though Kepler may have attained his conviction about the rightness of the Copernican system also from such primordial images, a decisive prerequisite for any reliable scientific theory remains that it subsequently stand the test of empirical checking and rational analysis. On this point Kepler himself was entirely agreed. Here are the natural sciences in a happier position than the arts because for science there is an inescapable and inexorable criterion of value from which no piece of research can subtract itself. The Copernican system, the Keplerian laws and Newton's mechanics have subsequently proved their worth – through the interpretation of experiences, the data of observation and technology – with such an extension and such an extreme precision that their rightness could no longer be doubted ever since the appearance of Newton's Principia . Still, what is in question here is an idealization – of the kind that Plato had considered necessary and Aristotle had reproved. 

This fact came to the fore with complete clarity only about 50 years ago. Then people realized, through the experiences of atomic physics, the Newton's conceptual construction no longer sufficed to attain to the mechanical phenomena in the interior of the atom. Since the Planckian discovery of the quantum of action in 1900, a situation of bewilderment had arisen in physics. The old rules according to which man had successfully described nature for over two centuries resisted an adaptation to the new experiences. But also these experiences themselves were internally contradictory. A hypothesis which proved valuable in one experiment failed in another. The beauty and compactness of the old physics appeared destroyed. It seemed that, out of the often diverging attempts, it was not possible to obtain a genuine insight into new and different interconnections. I do not know whether it is permissible to compare the situation of physics in those 25 years after the Planckian discovery – which I still experienced as a young student – to the conditions of contemporary modern art. But I must confess that such a comparison forces itself upon me, time and again. The helplessness before the question what one should do with bewildering phenomena, the affiction over the loss of interconnections which still appeared so convincing – all this dissatisfaction has certainly determined the traits of the two so different realms and epochs in a similar way. However, what is in question here is obviously a necessary intermediate stage which cannot be skipped and which prepares a future development. For – as Pauli put it – every understanding is a lengthy process which is introduced by unconscious processes, long before the consciousness content is capable of rational formulation. Archetypes function as the sought-for bridge between sense perceptions and ideas. In the moment, however, when the right ideas emerge, a completely undescribable process of highest intensity comes to pass in the soul of the person who sees them. It is the astonished fright of which Plato speaks in the  Phaedros . The soul, as it were, remembers what it had always possessed unconsciously. Kepler says: "geometria est archetypus pulchritudinis mundi". "Mathematics – we can generalize in translation – is the primordial image of the beauty of the world.'' In atomic physics this occurrence has been experienced less than fifty years ago. And it has restored exact natural science to a state of harmonious compactness under entirely new presuppositions – a state that had been lost for a quarter of a century. I do not see any reason why something similar should not happen one day in art. But one must add the warning: something like that man cannot make, it must happen by itself. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have described to you this aspect of exact natural science because in it the kinship to the fine arts becomes most clearly visible and because here the misunderstanding can be forstalled which sees science and technology as concerned only with exact observation and rational, discursive thinking. Of course rational thinking and accurate measuring do belong to the work of the investigator of nature – just as hammer and chisel belong to the work of the sculptor. But they are in both cases just tools, not content of the work itself. Perhaps at the close I may still recall once the second definition of the concept ‘beauty’ which stems from Plotinus and in which there is no mention of parts and whole. "Beauty is the translucence of the eternal splendor of the 'One' through the material phenomenon." There are important epochs in the history of art to which this definition applies better than to the aforementioned one. Frequently we feel a nostalgia for such epochs. But in our time it is difficult to speak of this aspect of beauty – and perhaps it is a good norm to adapt oneself to the customs of the time in which one has to live, and keep silent about that which is hard to say. In fact, the two definitions are not too remote from each other. Let us therefore be satisfied with the first more prosaic definition of beauty which certainly is verified also in natural science. And let us realize that beauty is – in exact natural science just as in the arts – the most important source of illumination and clarity. 

from a Lecture delivered to the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, München, July 9, 1970. Published as private paper in Stuttgart, 1971. Translation from German into English by Enrico Cantore.

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Survival of the Prettiest: Harvard Cognitive Scientist Nancy Etcoff on the Science of Beauty

By maria popova.

“That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express,” Francis Bacon observed in his essay on the subject . And yet for as far back as humanity can peer into the past, we’ve attempted again and again to capture and define beauty. For Indian philosopher Tagore, beauty was the Truth of eternity . For Richard Feynman, it was the mesmerism of complexity . For E. B. White, it was the power of simplicity . For the influential early art theorist Denman Waldo Ross, it was a supreme instance of order. For legendary philosopher Denis Dutton, it was “a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors.” But despite all these metaphysical explanations, we continue to strive for a concrete, tangible, material answer.

That’s precisely what Harvard’s Nancy Etcoff sets out to unearth in Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty ( public library ) — an inquiry into what we find beautiful and why that frames beauty as “the workings of a basic instinct” and explores such fascinating facets of the subject as our evolutionary wiring, the ubiquitous response to beauty across human cultures, and the universal qualities in people that evoke this response.

Etcoff begins by confronting our intellectual apologism for the cult of beauty:

Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing, and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become an embarrassment. But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with indifference to a baby’s cry. We can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our understanding of it.

Etcoff admonishes against confusing beauty with all the manufactured — and industriously exploited — stand-ins for it:

Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonald’s created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments we wear and find beautiful, but … this belongs to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty.

“If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty,” Darwin famously reflected , and Etcoff echoes his admonition in turning to the menacing domino effect of this proposition in action and what it robs us of:

The media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our preferences. A crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a beauty is followed by her imitator, and then by the imitator of her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was such a crowd pleaser that she’s been imitated by everyone from Jayne Mansfield to Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and thrives on diversity.

One of the most fascinating aspects of beauty, however, is how bound it is with judgment, and self-judgment in particular. One of the products of our narcissistic bias, Etcoff argues, is that we greatly exaggerate the minute fluctuations in our outward appearance:

To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best hours to our worst. In our mind’s eye, however, we undergo a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or our mental agility usually do not.

Equally, we direct our real-time assessments of appearance towards others:

We are always sizing up other people’s looks: our beauty detectors never close up shop and call it a day. We notice the attractiveness of each face we see as automatically as we register whether or not they look familiar. Beauty detectors scan the environment like radar: we can see a face for a fraction of a second (150 msec. in one psychology experiment) and rate its beauty, even give it the same rating we would give it on longer inspection. Long after we forget many important details about a person, our initial response stays in our memory.

She traces the cross-cultural, age-old extremes to which people go for “beauty” — or, really, for control of those judgments, whether by self or others:

In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. Tons of makeup—1,484 tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care products—are sold every minute. During famines, Kalahari bushmen in Africa still use animal fats to moisturize their skin, and in 1715 riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour for beauty purposes was only quelled by the French Revolution.

But our fixation on beauty is so profound that it even permeates the most elevated of human spirits. Etcoff gives Eleanor Roosevelt, one of history’s most remarkable hearts and minds , and Leo Tolstoy, enduring sage of human wisdom , as tragic examples:

When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets, her response was a poignant one: she wished she had been prettier. It is a sobering statement from one of the most revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life with many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a woman’s lament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth , Leo Tolstoy wrote, “I was frequently subject to moments of despair. I imagined that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a wide nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.… Nothing has such a striking impact on a man’s development as his appearance, and not so much his actual appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or unattractive.”

(It is especially ironic and demonstrative of the oppressive power of such ideals that Roosevelt famously wrote, “When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” )

Still, the mesmerism of beauty and its grip on us, Etcoff argues, is too deep-seated to be undone by its mere intellectual recognition:

Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self. This assumption may not be fair, and not how the best of all moral worlds would conduct itself. But that does not make it any less true. Beauty has consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will continue to operate — outside jurisdiction, in the lawless world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly collides with reality.

Framing beauty as a “basic pleasure,” Etcoff argues that our response to it is actually the sign of a healthy human mind. Conversely, the absence of such a response is one of the key symptoms of severe depression, one that goes hand-in-hand with anhedonia — the inability to take pleasure in things that once pleased us.

Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to it viscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration — breathtaking, femme fatale, knockout, drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell, stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational contemplation but as a response to physical urgency.

She offers some exquisite examples of beauty’s contemplation from the annals of literary history:

The most lyrical description of an encounter with beauty — solitary, spontaneous, with an unknown other—comes in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus sees a young woman standing by the shore with “long, slender bare legs,” and a face “touched with the wonder of mortal beauty.” Her beauty is transformative and gives form to his sensual and spiritual longings. “Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.… A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!” Ezra Pound had a moment of recognition that inspired him to write a two-line poem “In a station at the Métro,” which comprised these brief sentences: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.” Later, Pound described how he came to write it. “Three years ago in Paris I got out of a Métro train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy or as lovely as that sudden emotion.… In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”

Etcoff argues that we each possess an intrinsic beauty “template” that we intuit, against which we measure everything we observe:

People judge appearances as though somewhere in their minds an ideal beauty of the human form exists, a form they would recognize if they saw it, though they do not expect they ever will. It exists in the imagination. […] The human image has been subjected to all manner of manipulation in an attempt to create an ideal that does not seem to have a human incarnation. When Zeuxis painted Helen of Troy he gathered five of the most beautiful living women and represented features of each in the hope of capturing and depicting her beauty. There are no actual descriptions of Helen, nor of other legendary beauties such as Dante’s Beatrice. Their faces are blank slates, Rorschach inkblot tests of our imaginings of the features of perfect beauty.

But as unique as we would like to think we are, these inner templates turn out to be far more uniform. Etcoff cites the work of anthropometrist Leslie Farkas, who measured the facial proportions of 200 women, including 50 models, as well as young males and kids, and asked a large sample of participants to rate their appearance, then compared the results with the conventions of the classical beauty canon. The surprising findings, Etcoff argues, illustrates how measurement systems have failed at producing a formula for beauty and instead reveal something profound about the brokenness of the prescriptive canon:

The canon did not fare well. Many of the measures did not turn out to be important, such as the relative angles of the ear and nose. Some seemed pure idealizations: none of the faces and heads in profile corresponded to equal halves or thirds or fourths. Some were inaccurate—the distance between the eyes of the beauties was greater than that suggested by the canon (the width of the nose). Farkas’s results do not mean that a beautiful face will never match the Renaissance and classical ideals. But they do suggest that classical artists might have been wrong about the fundamental nature of human beauty. Perhaps they thought there was a mathematical ideal because this fit in a general way with platonic or religious ideas about the origin of the world.

And yet beauty is a very real piece of the human experience and bespeaks some of our greatest existential tensions, such as the mortality paradox . Etcoff writes:

Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope, a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to our body’s beauty without understanding all that we project onto our flesh.

Though at first glance borderline reductionist in its excessive reliance on evolutionary explanations, the rest of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty goes on demonstrate why science and philosophy need each other and how the social sciences fit into the intellectual debate on beauty. Complement it with Etcoff’s compelling TED talk on the surprising science of happiness — a fine addition to these essential reads on the art and science of happiness — in which she explores the evolutionary explanations of beauty:

— Published July 1, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ —

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May 21, 2014

Truth and beauty in science

Philip Ball who is one of my favorite science writers has a thoughtful rumination on the constant tussle between beauty and truth in science.

By Ashutosh Jogalekar

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Philip Ball who is one of my favorite science writers has a thoughtful rumination on the constant tussle between beauty and truth in science. Ball argues that the expectation of beauty as a guide to scientific truth is quite uncertain and messy and successes are anecdotal, and I tend to agree with him. There are undoubtedly theories like general relativity which have been called 'beautiful' by both their creators and their followers, but for many other concepts in science the definition is much more tricky. Ball again raises the question asked by Keats: is beauty truth? And is truth beauty?

To begin with it's clear to me that the definition of beauty depends on the field. For instance in physics it's much easier to call the Dirac equation beautiful based on the fact that it can be written on a napkin and can explain an untold number of phenomena in a spare, lucid line of symbols. But as I pointed out in a previous post, appreciating beauty in chemistry and biology is harder since most chemical and biological phenomena cannot be boiled down to simple-looking equations. In a previous post I have also noted how simple equations in chemistry can look beautiful and yet be approximate and limited, and how complicated equations can look ugly and yet be universal, giving answers precise to six decimal places. Which equation do you then define as being the more ‘beautiful’ one?

It's also apparent to chemists that in chemistry, beauty resides significantly in the visualization of chemical structures. Line drawings of molecules and 3D representations of proteins are recognizable as beautiful, even to non-chemists. Yet this beauty might be deceptively seductive. For instance many ‘impossible’ or highly unstable molecules look beautiful when sketched out, and many beautiful-looking protein structures are actually imperfect models, built from uncertain and messy data and subjects to the whims and biases of their creators.

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I have always suspected that 'beauty' is more of a place-card or a proxy for something else, and in his article Ball quotes the well-known physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed to this effect. It's a sentiment which sounds like a cogent guideline for defining beauty:

It’s not fashion, it’s not sociology. It’s not something that you might find beautiful today but won’t find beautiful 10 years from now. The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there’s no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that’s what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful.

In his quote Arkani-Hamed is alluding to many criteria of beauty cited especially by physicists and mathematicians; concision, universality, timelessness and inevitability. That's a worthy listing of qualities. Nobody expects the basic theorems of general relativity or quantum mechanics to be upended any time soon. However, Arkani-Hamed's quote also makes me suspect that it is precisely the connection of beauty with these other qualities that makes it accessible only to the most penetrating minds in the field. For instance Einstein, Paul Dirac and the mathematician Hermann Weyl are often quoted as thinkers who perpetuated howlers declaring their allegiance to beauty over truth. But another way to interpret these anecdotes is to wonder if Dirac, Weyl and Einstein were precisely the kind of superlative minds that could actually see beauty as the manifestation of these more subtle and deep qualities. If this were indeed true, then the mundane conclusion would be that beauty is indeed truth, but only when proclaimed by an Einstein, a Weyl or a Dirac.

There is one criterion among those described by Arkani-Hamed that does apply to the 3D representations of proteins that I discussed above - timelessness. For instance, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to many crystal structures of important biomolecular assemblies like the ribosome and the potassium ion channel. There is no doubt that more detailed explorations will uncover unexpected details of the structures, but the basic architecture of these fundamental molecular machines will likely never have to be revised; it is, for many purposes, timeless.

Other qualities that underlie beauty can be more controversial. For instance Ball says that the whole concept of symmetry which is not only regarded as a great test of beauty in physics but which has also led to many of the field's most fundamental advances, is also a poor guide in other fields like art and poetry. There are numerous instances of art (Picasso) and poetry (T. S. Eliot for instance) which lack elements of symmetry, and yet they are considered important classics. But that's where Ball points out that unlike the equations of relativity, art and poetry are much more subjective and therefore much more subject to the changing currents of society and fashion. But are they, really? We do consider Einstein’s field equations to be timeless, but what about ‘The Wasteland’?

Ultimately notions of beauty and its connection to truth are always going to be murky, of uncertain merit, even dubious. And yet I completely agree with Ball that scientists and artists should not give up their quest to find beauty in nature and in their works, if only because it serves to propel ideas forward and stimulate them to think in new ways. The one thing he asks is that they make their intentions and thought processes clear.

Despite all this, I don’t want scientists to abandon their talk of beauty. Anything that inspires scientific thinking is valuable, and if a quest for beauty – a notion of beauty peculiar to science, removed from art – does that, then bring it on. And if it gives them a language in which to converse with artists, rather than standing on soapboxes and trading magisterial insults like C P Snow and F R Leavis, all the better. I just wish they could be a bit more upfront about the fact that they are (as is their wont) torturing a poor, fuzzy, everyday word to make it fit their own requirements. I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ‘No, we’re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.’

Spotlight on Science: The Evolution of Beauty

• By Megha Chawla
• April 21, 2018

The Evolution of Beauty is a compelling and insightful look at beauty in nature through the eyes of Richard O. Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale. The book is Prum’s response to decades of research in the evolutionary sciences that have embraced Darwinian thought and theory of natural selection, while woefully ignoring Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Through a lifetime of observing birds in nature and researching the evolution of ornamental beauty, Prum contends to revive the arbitrary sexual selection hypothesis, or as he calls it, “Beauty Happens.”

According to Prum, animals have subjective tastes and preferences and the agency to act upon them via mate choice. Prum compares adaptationists, who believe that all traits have evolved to provide a better chance of survival and communicate information about mate quality, to economic theorists, who expect actors in a free market to behave completely rationally and purposefully. “Of course,” Prum says, “Evolution, like markets, is spurred by the irrational and subjective choices of its actors.” He provides a motley of colorful examples from the bird world to support this hypothesis, like the evolution of the male peacock’s seemingly useless tail which may even be harmful to survival, but has nonetheless persisted because the ladies like it.

In the animal kingdom, it is often the female who chooses a mate among available males. Because of this, Prum’s argument also has a feminist flair. He describes how male and female ducks’ genitalia and the male bowerbird’s elaborate bower-building ritual might have evolved for the same purpose—to protect females from forced copulation. Prum even extends his hypothesis to the evolution of the female orgasm in great apes and the size and shape of the human penis, claiming that female sexual autonomy has led to their evolution—or, in his words, “Pleasure Happens.”

The Evolution of Beauty is interdisciplinary at its core, and Prum passionately comments on evolution from multiple perspectives. While the book has been well-received—the New York Times named it as one of the ten best books of 2017—Prum says the response from the scientific community has been mostly mute. “I’m perfectly happy to lose the battle and win the war,” he said, hoping his work will inspire further research recognizing aesthetic preference as a strong force in evolution.

On the whole, The Evolution of Beauty endures as a brilliant anthology of beauty and desire in the natural world, written in engaging prose that is vivid, graphic, and at times unexpectedly funny. Prum humorously and appropriately quotes Sean Hannity’s remarks on his research: “Don’t we really need to know about duck sex?” If you thought you, like Sean Hannity, didn’t care about the mating habits of ducks—or never gave them any thought at all—this book will make you strongly reevaluate your indifference.

[1] Interview with Richard O. Prum, PhD, Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, interview on 02/02/18

[2] Darwin, F., (Ed), Letter to Asa Gray, dated 3 April 1860, The Life and Letters of Charles

Darwin, D. Appleton and Company, New York and London, Vol. 2, pp. 90–91, 1911

[3] Prum, R. O. (2017). The Evoltuion of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate

Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us.

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Recognizing the beauty of science, and the science behind beauty

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The Estée Lauder Companies has a long history of science and innovation. Fifty years ago, the prestige beauty company created the world’s first allergy-tested, fragrance free skincare line — and it has continued to roll out transformative beauty products ever since. The Company recently partnered with Nature Research to create two new prizes designed to inspire women in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM), one to honour early career female scientists making pioneering discoveries, and the other to recognize leaders — women and men — behind initiatives supporting greater equality in STEM. Biochemical engineer Lisa Napolione, who leads the Company’s R&D efforts, explains the impetus for the awards and how The Estée Lauder Companies takes a science-driven approach to skincare and beauty.

The new prizes are designed to inspire women in STEM, and focus on different things. Why put the spotlight on educators and young researchers?

Both of these areas are critical in their own right and integral to everything we do at The Estée Lauder Companies. We are a company that was founded by a pioneering woman who supported other women and who remains an inspiration to all of us — and so honouring exceptional female researchers through the Inspiring Science Award really spoke to us. We hope it not only shines a much-deserved light on the achievements of exceptional women in STEM, but also helps to establish a new generation of role models. The second award — the Innovating Science Award — recognizes a person or an organization that promotes STEM to girls and young women. I really feel strongly that young girls need role models and mentors in STEM, because without these influences we wouldn’t have the deep bench of research expertise among the next generation of scientists.

This all sounds very personal to you.

It is! I was so fortunate that early in my education, I had a mentoring role-model, Nora Kyser, who was one of the first female chemical and ceramic engineers in all of the United States. She was my high school chemistry teacher in my little hometown in western New York, and she arranged with the school district that, if she paid for her own research, she could work after hours in the school’s laboratory. She saw something in me, and hired me as her lab assistant. Her hands-on personal attention affected me so much. It was an amazing experience for which I will be forever grateful — and it inspired me to do for others what she did for me. I do what I do today because of her.

How does science inform how products are developed at The Estée Lauder Companies?

Many people in the scientific community don’t appreciate the breadth and depth of the serious science that happens in beauty. The Estée Lauder Companies’ R&D teams are constantly looking at breakthroughs in other fields of science and technology to inspire our skincare research. We conduct epigenetic research, including into sirtuins, nrf2 activation and cellular repair. Notably, we have conducted research on Nobel Prize-winning topics: Estée Lauder was the first cosmetic brand to research skin cells’ circadian rhythm and the role of ‘clock genes’ n cellular repair, and the first to research autophagy and its role in helping repair skin-cell damage. Last year, Estée Lauder R&D started mechanobiology research to help understand why and how blinking ages the look of the eyes, and now how light pollution, specifically blue light at night, desynchronizes skin cells’ natural repair.

Much of our research uses nature as the ultimate inspiration with more than 12,000 bioactive molecules in our database supported by hundreds of technical measures and assays. Plus, we have fermentation and biotechnology capabilities that allow us to produce high-performance ingredients in a multitude of organisms, including bacteria, yeast and mould. The power of fermentation can be seen in our La Mer brand, which is built around the Miracle Broth™ created from a unique three to four-month fermentation with a specific sea kelp. In all, this research has resulted in new products that can help protect against the visible effects of pollution, improve skin tone, reduce undesired pigmentation, and counteract visible skin and hair ageing. We are always looking at relevant applications in emerging scientific areas that have yet to fully materialize — because if it’s hot in science, it will be hot in beauty.

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We took a multi-pronged approach for the Clinique Even Better Clinical product for improving skin tone and visibly correcting dark spots. It’s such an interesting area of science, because there are multiple pathways behind the abnormal accumulation of melanin, the pigment responsible for these discolouration issues. We explored several approaches: new antioxidant ingredients that protect against free radicals; biofermentation technologies that target melanin clusters; and exfoliating agents to get rid of the dead skin cells that contain melanin dust. This all required a very detailed understanding of the underlying biology and a degree of scientific rigour that’s absolutely necessary for us to deliver products that really work.

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Science can be beautiful, but please don’t call it basic

Neuroscientist, University of Tasmania

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Dr Lila Landowski receives research funding from the Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation and The Mason Foundation, and her salary is funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council grant.

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This piece is republished with permission from Millenials Strike Back , the 56th edition of Griffith Review in which Generation Y writers address the issues that define and concern them.

The following is an extract taken from Modern Science, Modern Life .

Research underpinning fundamental scientific concepts or mechanisms of disease is referred to as “basic science”.

I detest the term.

It conjures up images of mundane, uninteresting, simple lab work, but this is rarely the case. No two days are the same.

And more importantly, basic science provides the crucial foundations for research pathways and is essential for identifying opportunities for innovation.

Perhaps it should be called discovery science? You can’t always see the potential applications for basic research; indeed, the applications may not even exist in our lifetime. Isaac Newton surely did not anticipate his universal law of gravitation being involved in the implementation of satellite technology.

Funding scientific research

Unfortunately, basic science remains one of the least attractive kinds of science to fund, especially in Australia. Our country is lagging behind as a result.

Australia is ranked 19th overall on the Global Innovation Index and just 73rd for “ innovation efficiency ”, which compares how much research input, across all fields, is turned into commercial output.

I wonder how much better we’d do if our National Health and Medical Research Council funded more than the current 18% of submitted research proposals. Of this funding, basic science receives proportionately little .

While investing in science that has more obvious and direct commercial outputs appears to make more economic sense than investing in basic science, you can’t take market logic and apply it to science. Some of its greatest achievements began with an accidental discovery or an unexpected result. This is the beauty of science.

For example, the discovery that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori was, in part, a beautiful accident. Australian Nobel laureates Barry Marshall and Robin Warren stumbled across the existence of this bacteria after their lab technician forgot to discard the experiment before the Easter holiday period.

Marshall and Warren wanted to confirm their observations that bacteria were present in the location of the stomach ulcer, so they had been collecting samples from people with diagnosed ulcers. The lab technician had seeded those samples onto a culture plate with a nutritious jelly and left them to grow for two days (as per standard bacterium-growing protocols). Nothing grew, and they didn’t find the evidence they were hoping for.

As it turns out, leaving them in the incubator for five days was key. It was the necessary step they didn’t know was missing.

Measuring value

The pressure to perform and publish also stifles the research landscape. A scientist’s worth is apparently quantifiable. We are judged on the volume and impact of our work.

The number of papers we write and the number of times those papers are cited are turned into a single number: an h-index . Technical skills, teaching and mentoring aptitude, passion, and experimental rigor don’t feature in the metrics. Some of the most brilliant scientists I have encountered exhibit all of these qualities, but do not have glowing h-indices to show for it.

Scientists and funding bodies generally acknowledge that the h-index is imperfect; however, the score still carries considerable weight, and can be key in deciding funding success, fellowships, promotions and, ultimately, a person’s ability to continue being a scientist.

In my eyes, this definition of success is wrong. A scientist with a high h-index, but who performs poor-quality research, does not embody success. Another problem is that scientific journals have an aversion to publishing negative results or minor findings, which, in turn, impacts researchers’ h-indices. A scientist who has spent years on an experiment that fails to yield a positive result may not have the opportunity to publish their work because journals want a juicy story: a new pathway discovered, a paradigm shift, something done with flashy new technology, or a potential cure.

This can come at a huge cost when the perceived value of the headline usurps the quality of the data or its interpretation, and, after many failed attempts at replication, the data gets retracted. This pressure on scientists to report significant results, especially unusual or breakthrough findings, in turn exposes the research itself to bias.

Public views of science

The bias in scientific reporting also flows on to the public. Journalists trawl academic journals for articles they can turn into splashy headlines and too often report half-truths, premature assumptions, and over-exaggerated extrapolations of data.

According to the media, there’s a new “treatment” reported for Alzheimer’s Disease every month. In reality, there is still no cure for Alzheimer’s Disease in humans.

Furthermore, if an experiment doesn’t have a positive result and therefore is not published, others are likely to waste time, money and resources repeating that work in the future. However, scientists are nothing if not problem solvers and pushed back against this tendency in recent years. For example, the journal PLOS ONE started a collection for all negative, null and inconclusive results, aptly titled The Missing Pieces .

It is refreshing to see that the requirement for significant results is no longer the only path to publishing research, but there’s still a long way to go.

A lonely road

A year ago, I was treading a very lonely path through science.

There were no funds for me to research full time in Hobart and I wasn’t able to move away for similar work elsewhere for family reasons. Instead I was fortunate to be able to do another job that I love: I taught full-time at a university while caring for my parents, and spent almost two years doing neuroscience research for free. You could say that I made it hard for myself, but I was determined.

I received a small grant for the materials necessary to complete the work. A portion of the grant was intended as a stipend; however, with the increasing cost of materials, I forfeited this to buy what I needed to perform what I saw as essential research.

I was also the only scientist working on peripheral nerves – in this case, nerves in the skin – in the institute’s laboratory at the time. I couldn’t benefit from collective knowledge, nor could I share the workload. Most weeks I worked around 80 hours, and often more. I didn’t resent this because I thought it was what I needed to do to keep up in the industry, but I later discovered that my efforts had instead disadvantaged my research career: taking time off work to be a carer or to have a child would have been accounted for in my research profile as a “career break”.

Oblivious to this, I’d tried to do it all while the research clock kept ticking and my h-index was diluted. I could have easily dropped off the radar.

I had been fighting so hard for the career I love, but the seemingly endless setbacks left me heartbroken and demoralised. I lamented on social media:

If only we, as scientists, could be judged on our passion and enthusiasm, our zest for driving new lines of inquiry, on our ability to ask the challenging questions, and for our genuine scientific skills.

Science is supremely beautiful, but I know it can be brutal and unforgiving if you stray from the well-worn pathways. Many people struggle, not fortunate enough to secure a job, a grant or a mentor to keep their passion alive. The issues with research practice and publication can be infuriating, particularly when the path you want to follow hasn’t been paved yet.

I am one of the lucky ones. My supervisor Professor Howells is a true advocate for junior researchers and is both my hero and my mentor. Rather than beating my own passage through the challenges of research, we face them as a team.

And it made all the difference: I’ve secured considerable funds to keep my research work going for the next three years. It’s safe to say that my heart is filled with hope.

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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 the history of 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 Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, there was revived interest in beauty and critique of the concept by the 1980s, particularly within feminist philosophy.

This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

2.1 the classical conception, 2.2 the idealist conception, 2.3 love and longing, 2.4 hedonist conceptions, 2.5 use and uselessness, 3.1 aristocracy and capital, 3.2 the feminist critique, 3.3 colonialism and race, 3.4 beauty and resistance, other internet resources, related entries.

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or rather an objective feature of beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone’s particular experiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species of philosophy’:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in The Critique of Judgment (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective . Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

However, if beauty is entirely subjective—that is, if anything that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as James Kirwan, for example, asserts)—then it seems that the word has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or learn from someone else why it is.

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one’s experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard other people’s taste, even when it differs from our own, as provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response, even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the beholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In De Veritate Religione , Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus’s account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I, 6])

In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept, or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception ( see below ) treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE), was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [ Ennead I, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ of the mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One argument for this was the variation in color experiences between people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with jaundice much of the world allegedly takes on a yellow cast. In addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable as a value at all across persons or societies.

Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant’s Critique Of Judgment attempt to find ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy of taste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective: de gustibus non est disputandum (about taste there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of good taste or of tastelessness. Some people’s tastes appear vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people’s taste is too exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the Canon was held to be, that if people did not experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume’s account focuses on the history and condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with regard to assessing people’s taste entail that judgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary prejudices. Hume moves from considering what makes a thing beautiful to what makes a critic credible. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived] from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section 34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture of a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one cares about that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the experiences of others.

By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is a disinterested judgment. It does not respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatment Kant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal range of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance, which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in its sheer representation in one’s experience:

Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by mere observation (intuition or reflection). … We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful , and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s dialogue The Moralists , where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort of thing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautiful ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example, may be beautiful without a reference group or “concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in the form or design of the object, or as Clive Bell (1914) put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting). By the time Bell writes in the early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person’s judgment from another’s (though in fact there may be). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a ‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to the universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer (1818), Hanslick (1891), Bullough (1912), and Croce (1928), for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as ‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that it is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the object itself were having subjective states.

We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes subjective states (indeed, one’s own) to a thing which in many instances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying that Santayana’s treatment of the topic in The Sense of Beauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck from Hume’s and Kant’s treatments was the subjectivity, not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue more urgent and more serious projects. More significantly, as we will see below, the political and economic associations of beauty with power tended to discredit the whole concept for much of the twentieth century. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like the classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy beginning in the 1990s, to some extent centered on the work of art critic Dave Hickey, who declared that “the issue of the 90s will be beauty” (see Hickey 1993), as well as feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept (see Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993). Several theorists made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore’s: “To say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.

Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a community that centers around it—a community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are present. For example, Kant’s treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible with one another many of these views are: for example, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely with uselessness.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated: nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics : “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2, 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies, is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid’s Elements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and, again, by the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos (late fifth/early fourth century BCE).

The Canon was not only a statue deigned to display perfect proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of “the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. For having taught us in that treatise all the symmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the statue itself, like the treatise, the Canon ” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of ‘symmetry’ in classical texts is distinct from and richer than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in the Sophist (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as symmetrical.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classical conception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, both in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying unity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis , and arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis , and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and Distribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia . Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result. Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of details in their context. This is attained when the details of the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical correspondence. Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot, palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that “There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection—for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful” ( Summa Theologica I, 39, 8).

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “What we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725, 29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in the Mathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725, 38).

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime :

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke 1757, 84–89)

There are many ways to interpret Plato’s relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in the Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically in the Symposium —perhaps the key Socratic text for neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato, 558–59 [ Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal: “And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for the good—which is to say that Love is a longing for immortality” (Plato, 559, [ Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment. … And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. … Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [ Symposium 210a–211d])

Beauty here is conceived—perhaps explicitly in contrast to the classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole—as perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout. All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus, 21 [ Ennead I,6])

Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I,3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a richly-appointed church:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959, 14)

This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and finally, the intelligence that makes even these artists (that is, God). Shaftesbury’s character Theocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. … Whatever appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. … Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738, 228–29)

Schiller’s expression of a similar series of thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct and guide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity. Beauty … makes of man a whole, complete in himself. (1795, 59–60, 86)

For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are we—who exist simultaneously on both these levels—free. This is quite similar to Plato’s ‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—is more concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including in the tripartite dialectical structure of his account—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from finitude to the infinite, formulations that—while they are influenced by Schiller—strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus, and Plato.

Hegel, who associates beauty and art with mind and spirit, holds with Shaftesbury that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, “the beauty of art is born of the spirit and born again ” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. “The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certain persons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one, comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts” (Croce 1928, 230).

Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (Burke 1757, 83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or ataraxia , as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world.

There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho’s famous fragment 16: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I say it’s whatever you love best” (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at Phaedrus 236c, Socrates appears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greater insight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

Plato’s discussions of beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In the former, love is portrayed as the ‘child’ of poverty and plenty. “Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato, 556 [Symposium 203b–d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the infinite.

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho’s fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing” and characterizes longing as intense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas writes that “I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don’t stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction” (Nehamas 2007, 77).

Thinkers of the 18 th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a typical formulation, says that “By beautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical formal elements or in terms of the viewer’s pleasurable response. He begins the Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears to assert that objects which instantiate his ‘compound ratio of uniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider, is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify’d by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolute beauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities of the beautiful thing (a “compound ratio” of uniformity and variety), and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come apart from Hutcheson’s particular aesthetic preferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus’s, for example. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as its objects.

Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature :

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740, 299)

Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon talking about the ‘sentiment of beauty,’ where sentiment is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or ideas, though the experience of beauty is a matter of cultivated or delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant’s Third Critique and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of pleasure.

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extreme expression of this orientation—is the assertion of the positivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless or without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus seems contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no reasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. “ Taste is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful ” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from practical concerns: “Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” (Bullough 1912, 244).

On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use. ‘Beauty’ is perhaps one of the few terms that could plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene took a rather direct approach.

Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty? Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes Laertius, 94)

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of thinkers. Xenophon’s Memorabilia puts the view in the mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates : In short everything which we use is considered both good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use. Aristippus : Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing? Socrates : Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill. (Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue Alciphron , though he begins with the hedonist conception: “Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley 1732, 174; see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of object it is and, again, a beautiful car might make an ugly tractor. “The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole” (Berkeley 1732, 174–75; see Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing and assess its suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of ‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as well as serves its purpose.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not less beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009) returns to a modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched by many and varied examples. “We call something beautiful,” writes Scruton, “when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form ” (Scruton 2009, 26). Despite the Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one loves is not merely to place one body part on another, “but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising – it is a move from one self toward another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being” (Scruton 2009, 48). This, Scruton says, is a profound pleasure.

3. The Politics of Beauty

Kissing sounds nice, but some kisses are coerced, some pleasures obtained at a cost to other people. The political associations of beauty over the last few centuries have been remarkably various and remarkably problematic, particularly in connection with race and gender, but in other aspects as well. This perhaps helps account for the neglect of the issue in early-to-mid twentieth-century philosophy as well as its growth late in the century as an issue in social justice movements, and subsequently in social-justice oriented philosophy.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 associated beauty with the French aristocracy and with the Rococo style of the French royal family, as in the paintings of Fragonard: hedonist expressions of wealth and decadence, every inch filled with decorative motifs. Beauty itself became subject to a moral and political critique, or even to direct destruction, with political motivations (see Levey 1985). And by the early 20th century, beauty was particularly associated with capitalism (ironically enough, considering the ugliness of the poverty and environmental destruction it often induced). At times even great art appeared to be dedicated mainly to furnishing the homes of rich people, with the effect of concealing the suffering they were inflicting. In response, many anti-capitalists, including many Marxists, appeared to repudiate beauty entirely. And in the aesthetic politics of Nazism, reflected for example in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the association of beauty and right wing politics was sealed to devastating effect (see Spotts 2003).

Early on in his authorship, Karl Marx could hint that the experience of beauty distinguishes human beings from all other animals. An animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx 1844, 76). But later Marx appeared to conceive beauty as “superstructure” or “ideology” disguising the material conditions of production. Perhaps, however, he also anticipated the emergence of new beauties, available to all both as makers and appreciators, in socialism.

Capitalism, of course, uses beauty – at times with complete self-consciousness – to manipulate people into buying things. Many Marxists believed that the arts must be turned from providing fripperies to the privileged or advertising that helps make them wealthier to showing the dark realities of capitalism (as in the American Ashcan school, for example), and articulating an inspiring Communist future. Stalinist socialist realism consciously repudiates the aestheticized beauties of post-impressionist and abstract painting, for example. It has urgent social tasks to perform (see Bown and Lanfranconi 2012). But the critique tended at times to generalize to all sorts of beauty: as luxury, as seduction, as disguise and oppression. The artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), having survived the First World War, wrote this about the radical artists of the early century: “To us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream” (quoted in Danto 2003, 49).

Theodor Adorno, in his book Aesthetic Theory , wrote that one symptom of oppression is that oppressed groups and cultures are regarded as uncouth, dirty, ragged; in short, that poverty is ugly. It is art’s obligation, he wrote, to show this ugliness, imposed on people by an unjust system, clearly and without flinching, rather to distract people by beauty from the brutal realities of capitalism. “Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer to integrate or mitigate it or reconcile it with its own existence,” Adorno wrote. “Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image” (Adorno 1970, 48–9).

The political entanglements of beauty tend to throw into question various of the traditional theories. For example, the purity and transcendence associated with the essence of beauty in the realm of the Forms seems irrelevant, as beauty shows its centrality to politics and commerce, to concrete dimensions of oppression. The austere formalism of the classical conception, for example, seems neither here nor there when the building process is brutally exploitative.

As we have seen, the association of beauty with the erotic is proverbial from Sappho and is emphasized relentlessly by figures such as Burke and Nehamas. But the erotic is not a neutral or universal site, and we need to ask whose sexuality is in play in the history of beauty, with what effects. This history, particularly in the West and as many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized, is associated with the objectification and exploitation of women. Feminists beginning in the 19th century gave fundamental critiques of the use of beauty as a set of norms to control women’s bodies or to constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in profound and disabling ways (see Wollstonecraft 1792, Grimké 1837).

In patriarchal society, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it, the content of sexuality “is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content,” she continues, describing her treatment of the subject, “for the gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal. That is the content of sexuality that defines gender female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method” (MacKinnon 1987, 53–4). Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reaches one variety of radical critique and conclusion: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 1975, 60).

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic treatment was focused on the scopophilia (a Freudian term denoting neurotic sexual pleasure configured around looking) of Hollywood films, in which men appeared as protagonists, and women as decorative or sexual objects for the pleasure of the male characters and male audience-members. She locates beauty “at the heart of our oppression.” And she appears to have a hedonist conception of it: beauty engenders pleasure. But some pleasures, like some kisses, are sadistic or exploitative at the individual and at the societal level. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin (1988) and Griselda Pollock (1987) brought such insights to bear on the history of painting, for example, where the scopophilia is all too evident in famous nudes such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus , which a feminist slashed with knife in 1914 because “she didn’t like the way men gawked at it”.

Feminists such as Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth , generalized such insights into a critique of the ways women are represented throughout Western popular culture: in advertising, for example, or music videos. Such practices have the effect of constraining women to certain acceptable ways of presenting themselves publicly, which in turn greatly constrains how seriously they are taken, or how much of themselves they can express in public space. As have many other commentators, Wolf connects the representation of the “beautiful” female body, in Western high art but especially in popular culture, to eating disorders and many other self-destructive behaviors, and indicates that a real overturning of gender hierarchy will require deeply re-construing the concept of beauty.

The demand on women to create a beautiful self-presentation by male standards, Wolf argues, fundamentally compromises women’s action and self-understanding, and makes fully human relationships between men and women difficult or impossible. In this Wolf follows, among others, the French thinker Luce Irigaray, who wrote that “Female beauty is always considered as finery ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of, an appearance of, a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone , rarely to interrogate the state of our body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our becoming” (quoted in Robinson 2000, 230).

“Sex is held hostage by beauty,” Wolf remarks, “and its ransom terms are engraved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film” (Wolf 1991f, 157).

Early in the 20th century, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) described European or white standards of beauty as a deep dimension of oppression, quite similarly to the way Naomi Wolf describes beauty standards for women. These standards are relentlessly reinforced in authoritative images, but they are incompatible with black skin, black bodies, and also traditional African ways of understanding human beauty. White standards of beauty, Garvey argued, devalue black bodies. The truly oppressive aspects of such norms can be seen in the way they induce self-alienation, as Wolf argues with regard to sexualized images of women. “Some of us in America, the West Indies, and Africa believe that the nearer we approach the white man in color, the greater our social standing and privilege,” he wrote (Garvey 1925 [1986], 56). He condemns skin bleaching and hair straightening as ways that black people are taught to devalue themselves by white standards of beauty. And he connects such standards to ‘colorism’ or prejudice in the African-American community toward darker-skinned black people.

Such observations suggest some of the strengths of cultural relativism as opposed to subjectivism or universalism: standards of beauty appear in this picture not to be idiosyncratic to individuals, nor to be universal among all people, but to be tied to group identities and to oppression and resistance.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1925–1965), whose parents were activists in the Garvey movement, describes ‘conking’ or straightening his hair with lye products as a young man. “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation,” he writes, “when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that black people are ‘inferior’ – and white people ‘superior’ – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards” (X 1964, 56–7). For both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, a key moment in the transformation of racial oppression would be the affirmation of standards of black beauty that are not parasitic on white standards, and hence not directly involved in racial oppression. This was systematically developed after Malcolm’s death in the “natural” hairstyles and African fabrics in the Black Power movement. Certainly, people have many motivations for straightening or coloring their hair, for example. But the critical examination of the racial content of beauty norms was a key moment in black liberation movements, many of which, around 1970, coalesced around the slogan Black is beautiful . These are critiques of specific standards of beauty; they are also tributes to beauty’s power.

Imposing standards of beauty on non-Western cultures, and, in particular, misappropriating standards of beauty and beautiful objects from them, formed one of the most complex strategies of colonialism. Edward Said famously termed this dynamic “orientalism.” Novelists such as Nerval and Kipling and painters such as Delacroix and Picasso, he argued, used motifs drawn from Asian and African cultures, treating them as “exotic” insertions into Western arts. Such writers and artists might even have understood themselves to be celebrating the cultures they depicted in pictures of Arabian warriors or African masks. But they used this imagery precisely in relation to Western art history. They distorted what they appropriated.

“Being a White Man, in short,” writes Said, “was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible” (Said 1978, 227). This style might be encapsulated in the outfits of colonial governors, and their mansions. But it was also typified by an appropriative “appreciation” of “savage” arts and “exotic” beauties, which were of course not savage or exotic in their own context. Even in cases where the beauty of such objects was celebrated, the appreciation was mixed with condescension and misapprehension, and also associated with stripping colonial possessions of their most beautiful objects (as Europeans understood beauty)—shipping them back to the British Museum, for example. Now some beautiful objects, looted in colonialism, are being returned to their points of origin (see Matthes 2017), but many others remain in dispute.

However, if beauty has been an element in various forms of oppression, it has also been an element in various forms of resistance, as the slogan “Black is beautiful” suggests. The most compelling responses to oppressive standards and uses of beauty have given rise to what might be termed counter-beauties . When fighting discrimination against people with disabilities, for example, one may decry the oppressive norms that regard disabled bodies as ugly and leave it at that. Or one might try to discover what new standards of beauty and subversive pleasures might arise in the attempt to regard disabled bodies as beautiful (Siebers 2005). For that matter, one might uncover the ways that non-normative bodies and subversive pleasures actually do fulfill various traditional criteria of beauty. Indeed, for some decades there has been a disability arts movement, often associated with artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Riva Lehrer, which tries to do just that (see Siebers 2005).

The exploration of beauty, in some ways flipping it over into an instrument of feminist resistance, or showing directly how women’s beauty could be experienced outside of patriarchy, has been a theme of much art by women of the 20th and 21st centuries. Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” place settings undertake to absorb and reverse the objectifying gaze. The exploration of the meaning of the female body in the work of performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Karen Finley, and Orlan, tries both to explore the objectification of the female body and to affirm women’s experience in its concrete realities from the inside: to make of it emphatically a subject rather than an object (see Striff 1997).

“Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving,” wrote philosopher Peg Zeglin Brand in 2000. “Confident young women today pack their closets with mini-skirts and sensible suits. Young female artists toy with feminine stereotypes in ways that make their feminist elders uncomfortable. They recognize that … beauty can be a double-edged sword – as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing them” (Brand 2000, xv). Indeed, vernacular norms of beauty as expressed in media and advertising have shifted in virtue of the feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms, as the concept’s long journey continues.

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aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle | Ayer, Alfred Jules | Burke, Edmund | Croce, Benedetto: aesthetics | feminist philosophy, interventions: aesthetics | hedonism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: aesthetics | Hume, David: aesthetics | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Kant, Immanuel: theory of judgment | medieval philosophy | Neoplatonism | Plato: aesthetics | Plotinus | Santayana, George | Schiller, Friedrich | Schopenhauer, Arthur | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of]

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The Beauty: From Philosophical Thought to Fashion

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This article discusses the philosophy that portrays beauty and how each philosopher theorized beauty in their narratives, namely Plato, Aristotle and Kant. The essay aims to report how beauty was initially described and what were the aspects that transformed these thoughts into a science that shaped aesthetics as far as we know it. The research moves on to the philosophy of the 20th century with authors such as Gilles Lipovetsky and Luc Ferry who were instrumental in understanding the progressive affirmation of Beauty through difference and the expression of the self. The analysis is of an investigative and exploratory nature accentuated in the process of analysis of relevant literature around the proposed theme.

• 20th century

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Nietzsche’s radicalism is only imposed because, after Plato, philosophy never ceased to devalue the sensible world in relation to the intelligible world. The instrument of this discrimination was called “dialectic”. In a certain sense, the Nietzschean moment entertains itself with the negation of the Platonic-Hegelian dialectic of art, a relationship analogous to that which the Kantian moment establishes with classical rationalism. In both cases, it is about conquering or regaining the autonomy of sensibility. Luc Ferry - Le sens du Beau. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2002, p. 145.

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Beauty Standards and Their Impact Essay

Introduction.

Beauty generally refers to the mixture of aesthetic qualities such as form, shape and color that pleases the eyesight. Beauty is divided into two broad branches, that is, human beauty and beauty in things around us. Human beauty can also be classified into physical beauty and beauty of the soul. Beauty in things around us entails architecture and physical features.

Society at large has always put emphasis that beauty being admired and looked after trait. A good example in a society is a Marketing and Advertisement Industry that sells all everything by showcasing its beauty. Some countries however hold beauty more highly than others. Such countries include The U.S is the leading.

The physical beauty of a person opens ways for the person to get their soulmates without struggle. It is usually the first impression that makes the attraction to a mate much easier. It smoothens the bumps that life gives during the search for a soulmate. However, you should take into account that its importance fades away quickly with time. As you go through life, you realize that what you thought was beauty fades away. During this period, people tend to embark on the other kind of beauty which is the beauty of the soul. The beauty of the soul entails traits such as personality, sense of humor, intelligence and other factors that entail a person’s character.

The beauty of the things around us such as the works of architecture such as unique buildings, bridges and others and physical features such as mountains and water bodies are very important as they bring happiness and joy to our eyesight. They are used as sources of recreational facilities for both children and adults. Children go to places rich in physical features to break class monotony. Adults go to beautiful places while depressed or just while they need some refreshment. They are also used as sources of learning facilities for persons of all ages. Children go to learn new things in their environment and that is the same with adults.

All people need beauty but it depends on which type of beauty is in question. To explain this, children only find beauty in things such as toys and also in places they go. Adults on the other hand see the world clearly and thus they need beauty in everything they do and places they go. Some people however need beauty more than others. Women for example tend to be more obsessed with beauty in almost everything. They always look for perfection in their body and also in everything they do on a daily basis. This has consequently made them turn to cosmetics in order to look more beautiful. Some are now even doing surgery to modify their faces and other parts of their bodies. People always need beauty in their lives. This is always largely contributed by things around them. Take, for example, a beautiful compound with a wonderful house and a beautiful garden in the backyard that will always bring happiness and improve the lives of people living there.

As the say goes, beauty is in the beholder’s eyes. The perception of people on beauty is influenced by cultural heritage. For instance, American culture perceives youthfulness as beauty and European perceives flawless skin as an ideal beauty. In Africa, however, a filled-out large figure is referred to as beauty. In today’s society, beauty is people are beginning to relate beauty to be prosperous and happy. Many cultures have fueled the obsession with women being pretty and that in turn led to the introduction of cosmetics among different cultures. Almost all the cultures in the world value beauty so highly that many quantitative measures of beauty are constructed socially.

There are some types of beauty that the media have long forgotten and no longer classify as types of beauty. These include architecture and music. The media nowadays classify architecture as more of a science than art while the music on the other hand is long forgotten when they talk about those categories. Through the help of the media, our concepts about beauty can be globalized more so through social media networks as almost all the young people in this new generation are using social media networks and the information can travel faster.

There are many controversies about beauty in nature compared to that in human form. It is important that we consider all as having beauty but the one has more beauty than the other. Human being has a beauty that fades away with time while nature has a permanent beauty that never fades away. For example, take a look at the sky, the moon, the river and so on, their beauty last forever. Men are interested in the beauty of other things than that of their own while women always tend to be self-centered when it comes to beauty. Concerning your appearance is normal and understandable. In today’s society, everywhere you go be it at work, school, or interview, your personal appearance will always influence people’s impression of you.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the standards that society has put on women have enabled some women to thrive and become successful. Let’s take America for example, a country that produces many models and enables women to develop their careers in terms of beauty. It has led to many other opportunities such as selling cosmetics and fashion design.

The physical beauty of human beings fades away with time. The beauty of nature and of the soul is permanent. Society has set some unrealistic standards for women in terms of beauty which are vague and should be overlooked.

Skivko, M. (2020). Deconstruction in Fashion as a Path Toward New Beauty Standards: The Maison Margiela Case. ZoneModa Journal , 10 (1), 39-49.

McCray, S. (2018). Redefining Society’s Beauty Standards.

Capaldi, C. A., Passmore, H. A., Ishii, R., Chistopolskaya, K. A., Vowinckel, J., Nikolaev, E. L., & Semikin, G. I. (2017). Engaging with natural beauty may be related to well-being because it connects people to nature: Evidence from three cultures. Ecopsychology, 9(4), 199-211.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Beauty Standards and Their Impact." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/.

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• Solar Eclipse 2024

What the World Has Learned From Past Eclipses

C louds scudded over the small volcanic island of Principe, off the western coast of Africa, on the afternoon of May 29, 1919. Arthur Eddington, director of the Cambridge Observatory in the U.K., waited for the Sun to emerge. The remains of a morning thunderstorm could ruin everything.

The island was about to experience the rare and overwhelming sight of a total solar eclipse. For six minutes, the longest eclipse since 1416, the Moon would completely block the face of the Sun, pulling a curtain of darkness over a thin stripe of Earth. Eddington traveled into the eclipse path to try and prove one of the most consequential ideas of his age: Albert Einstein’s new theory of general relativity.

Eddington, a physicist, was one of the few people at the time who understood the theory, which Einstein proposed in 1915. But many other scientists were stymied by the bizarre idea that gravity is not a mutual attraction, but a warping of spacetime. Light itself would be subject to this warping, too. So an eclipse would be the best way to prove whether the theory was true, because with the Sun’s light blocked by the Moon, astronomers would be able to see whether the Sun’s gravity bent the light of distant stars behind it.

Two teams of astronomers boarded ships steaming from Liverpool, England, in March 1919 to watch the eclipse and take the measure of the stars. Eddington and his team went to Principe, and another team led by Frank Dyson of the Greenwich Observatory went to Sobral, Brazil.

Totality, the complete obscuration of the Sun, would be at 2:13 local time in Principe. Moments before the Moon slid in front of the Sun, the clouds finally began breaking up. For a moment, it was totally clear. Eddington and his group hastily captured images of a star cluster found near the Sun that day, called the Hyades, found in the constellation of Taurus. The astronomers were using the best astronomical technology of the time, photographic plates, which are large exposures taken on glass instead of film. Stars appeared on seven of the plates, and solar “prominences,” filaments of gas streaming from the Sun, appeared on others.

Eddington wanted to stay in Principe to measure the Hyades when there was no eclipse, but a ship workers’ strike made him leave early. Later, Eddington and Dyson both compared the glass plates taken during the eclipse to other glass plates captured of the Hyades in a different part of the sky, when there was no eclipse. On the images from Eddington’s and Dyson’s expeditions, the stars were not aligned. The 40-year-old Einstein was right.

“Lights All Askew In the Heavens,” the New York Times proclaimed when the scientific papers were published. The eclipse was the key to the discovery—as so many solar eclipses before and since have illuminated new findings about our universe.

To understand why Eddington and Dyson traveled such distances to watch the eclipse, we need to talk about gravity.

Since at least the days of Isaac Newton, who wrote in 1687, scientists thought gravity was a simple force of mutual attraction. Newton proposed that every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe, and that the strength of this attraction is related to the size of the objects and the distances among them. This is mostly true, actually, but it’s a little more nuanced than that.

On much larger scales, like among black holes or galaxy clusters, Newtonian gravity falls short. It also can’t accurately account for the movement of large objects that are close together, such as how the orbit of Mercury is affected by its proximity the Sun.

Albert Einstein’s most consequential breakthrough solved these problems. General relativity holds that gravity is not really an invisible force of mutual attraction, but a distortion. Rather than some kind of mutual tug-of-war, large objects like the Sun and other stars respond relative to each other because the space they are in has been altered. Their mass is so great that they bend the fabric of space and time around themselves.

Read More: 10 Surprising Facts About the 2024 Solar Eclipse

This was a weird concept, and many scientists thought Einstein’s ideas and equations were ridiculous. But others thought it sounded reasonable. Einstein and others knew that if the theory was correct, and the fabric of reality is bending around large objects, then light itself would have to follow that bend. The light of a star in the great distance, for instance, would seem to curve around a large object in front of it, nearer to us—like our Sun. But normally, it’s impossible to study stars behind the Sun to measure this effect. Enter an eclipse.

Einstein’s theory gives an equation for how much the Sun’s gravity would displace the images of background stars. Newton’s theory predicts only half that amount of displacement.

Eddington and Dyson measured the Hyades cluster because it contains many stars; the more stars to distort, the better the comparison. Both teams of scientists encountered strange political and natural obstacles in making the discovery, which are chronicled beautifully in the book No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity , by the physicist Daniel Kennefick. But the confirmation of Einstein’s ideas was worth it. Eddington said as much in a letter to his mother: “The one good plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein,” he wrote , “and I think I have got a little confirmation from a second plate.”

The Eddington-Dyson experiments were hardly the first time scientists used eclipses to make profound new discoveries. The idea dates to the beginnings of human civilization.

Careful records of lunar and solar eclipses are one of the greatest legacies of ancient Babylon. Astronomers—or astrologers, really, but the goal was the same—were able to predict both lunar and solar eclipses with impressive accuracy. They worked out what we now call the Saros Cycle, a repeating period of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours in which eclipses appear to repeat. One Saros cycle is equal to 223 synodic months, which is the time it takes the Moon to return to the same phase as seen from Earth. They also figured out, though may not have understood it completely, the geometry that enables eclipses to happen.

The path we trace around the Sun is called the ecliptic. Our planet’s axis is tilted with respect to the ecliptic plane, which is why we have seasons, and why the other celestial bodies seem to cross the same general path in our sky.

As the Moon goes around Earth, it, too, crosses the plane of the ecliptic twice in a year. The ascending node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic. The descending node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic. When the Moon crosses a node, a total solar eclipse can happen. Ancient astronomers were aware of these points in the sky, and by the apex of Babylonian civilization, they were very good at predicting when eclipses would occur.

Two and a half millennia later, in 2016, astronomers used these same ancient records to measure the change in the rate at which Earth’s rotation is slowing—which is to say, the amount by which are days are lengthening, over thousands of years.

By the middle of the 19 th century, scientific discoveries came at a frenetic pace, and eclipses powered many of them. In October 1868, two astronomers, Pierre Jules César Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer, separately measured the colors of sunlight during a total eclipse. Each found evidence of an unknown element, indicating a new discovery: Helium, named for the Greek god of the Sun. In another eclipse in 1869, astronomers found convincing evidence of another new element, which they nicknamed coronium—before learning a few decades later that it was not a new element, but highly ionized iron, indicating that the Sun’s atmosphere is exceptionally, bizarrely hot. This oddity led to the prediction, in the 1950s, of a continual outflow that we now call the solar wind.

And during solar eclipses between 1878 and 1908, astronomers searched in vain for a proposed extra planet within the orbit of Mercury. Provisionally named Vulcan, this planet was thought to exist because Newtonian gravity could not fully describe Mercury’s strange orbit. The matter of the innermost planet’s path was settled, finally, in 1915, when Einstein used general relativity equations to explain it.

Many eclipse expeditions were intended to learn something new, or to prove an idea right—or wrong. But many of these discoveries have major practical effects on us. Understanding the Sun, and why its atmosphere gets so hot, can help us predict solar outbursts that could disrupt the power grid and communications satellites. Understanding gravity, at all scales, allows us to know and to navigate the cosmos.

GPS satellites, for instance, provide accurate measurements down to inches on Earth. Relativity equations account for the effects of the Earth’s gravity and the distances between the satellites and their receivers on the ground. Special relativity holds that the clocks on satellites, which experience weaker gravity, seem to run slower than clocks under the stronger force of gravity on Earth. From the point of view of the satellite, Earth clocks seem to run faster. We can use different satellites in different positions, and different ground stations, to accurately triangulate our positions on Earth down to inches. Without those calculations, GPS satellites would be far less precise.

This year, scientists fanned out across North America and in the skies above it will continue the legacy of eclipse science. Scientists from NASA and several universities and other research institutions will study Earth’s atmosphere; the Sun’s atmosphere; the Sun’s magnetic fields; and the Sun’s atmospheric outbursts, called coronal mass ejections.

When you look up at the Sun and Moon on the eclipse , the Moon’s day — or just observe its shadow darkening the ground beneath the clouds, which seems more likely — think about all the discoveries still yet waiting to happen, just behind the shadow of the Moon.

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A Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse

By Rivka Galchen

On April 8th, the moon will partly and then entirely block out the sun. The total eclipse will be visible to those in a hundred-and-fifteen-mile-wide sash, called the path of totality, slung from the hip of Sinaloa to the shoulder of Newfoundland. At the path’s midline, the untimely starry sky will last nearly four and a half minutes, and at the edges it will last for a blink. On the ground, the lunacy around total eclipses often has a Lollapalooza feel. Little-known places in the path of totality—Radar Base, Texas; Perryville, Missouri—have been preparing, many of them for years, to accommodate the lawn chairs, soul bands, food trucks, sellers of commemorative pins, and porta-potties. Eclipse viewers seeking solitude may also cause problems: the local government of Mars Hill, Maine, is reminding people that trails on Mt. Katahdin are closed, because it is mud season and therefore dangerous. I have a friend whose feelings and opinions often mirror my own; when I told her a year ago that I had booked an Airbnb in Austin in order to see this eclipse, she looked at me as if I’d announced I was bringing my daughter to a pox party.

Altering plans because of this periodic celestial event has a long tradition, however. On May 28, 585 B.C., according to Herodotus, an eclipse led the Medes and Lydians, after more than five years of war, to become “alike anxious” to come to peace. More than a hundred years before that, the Assyrian royalty of Mesopotamia protected themselves from the ill omen of solar eclipses—and from other celestial signs perceived as threatening—by installing substitute kings and queens for the day. Afterward, the substitutes were usually killed, though in one instance, when the real king died, the stand-in, who had been a gardener, held the throne for decades. More recently, an eclipse on May 29, 1919, enabled measurements that recorded the sun bending the path of light in accordance with, and thus verifying, Einstein’s theory of general relativity .

Any given spot on the Earth witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every three hundred and seventy-five years, on average, but somewhere on the planet witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every eighteen months. In Annie Dillard’s essay “ Total Eclipse ,” she says of a partial solar eclipse that it has the relation to a total one that kissing a man has to marrying him, or that flying in a plane has to falling out of a plane. “Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it,” she writes. During a partial eclipse, you put on the goofy paper eyeglasses and see the outline of the moon reducing its rival, the sun, to a solar cassava, or slimmer. It’s a cool thing to see, and it maybe hints at human vulnerability, the weirdness of light, the scale and reality of the world beyond our planet. But, even when the moon blocks ninety-nine per cent of the sun, it’s still daylight out. When the moon occludes the whole of the sun, everyday expectations collapse: the temperature quickly drops, the colors of shadows become tinny, day flips to darkness, stars precipitously appear, birds stop chirping, bees head back to their hives, hippos come out for their nightly grazing, and humans shout or hide or study or pray or take measurements until, seconds or minutes later, sunlight, and the familiar world, abruptly returns.

It is complete earthly luck that total eclipses follow such a dramatic procession. Our moon, which is about four hundred times less wide than our sun, is also about four hundred times closer to us. For this reason, when the Earth, moon, and sun align with one another, our moon conceals our sun precisely, like a cap over a lens. (I stress “our moon” because other moons around other planets, including planets that orbit other stars, have eclipses that almost certainly don’t line up so nicely.) If our moon were smaller or farther away, or our sun larger or nearer, our sun would never be totally eclipsed. Conversely, if our moon were larger or closer (or our sun smaller or farther away) then our sun would be wholly eclipsed—but we would miss an ecliptic revelation. During totality, a thin circle of brightness rings the moon. Johannes Kepler thought that the circle was the illumination of the atmosphere of the moon, but we now know that the moon has next to no atmosphere and that the bright circle (the corona) is the outermost part of the atmosphere of the sun . A million times less bright than the sun itself, the corona is visible (without a special telescope) only during an eclipse. If we’re judging by images and reports, the corona looks like a fiery halo. I have never seen the sun’s corona. The first total solar eclipse I’ll witness will be this one.

The physicist Frank Close saw a partial eclipse on a bright day in Peterborough, England, in June, 1954, at the age of eight. Close’s science teacher, using cricket and soccer balls to represent the moon and the sun, explained the shadows cast by the moon; Close attributes his life in science to this experience. The teacher also told the class that, forty-five years into the future, there would be a total eclipse visible from England, and Close resolved to see it. That day turned out to be overcast, so the moon-eclipsed sun wasn’t visible—but Close described seeing what felt to him like a vision of the Apocalypse, with a “tsunami of darkness rushing towards me . . . as if a black cloak had been cast over everything” and then the clouds over the sun dispersing briefly when totality was nearly over. Close has since seen six more eclipses and written two books about them, the first a memoir of “chasing” eclipses (“ Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon ”) and the second a general explainer (“ Eclipses: What Everyone Needs to Know ”).

“I’ve tried to describe each of the eclipses I’ve seen, and I do describe them, but it’s not really describable. There’s no natural phenomenon to compare it to,” he told me recently. Describing an eclipse to someone who hasn’t seen one is like trying to describe the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” to someone who has never heard music, he said. “You can describe notes, frequencies of vibration, but we all know that’s missing the whole thing.” Total eclipses are also close to impossible to film in any meaningful way. The light level plummets, which your eye can process in a way that, say, your mobile phone can’t.

In the half hour or so before totality, as the moon makes its progress across the circle of the sun, colors shift to hues of red and brown. (Dillard, a magus of describing the indescribable, writes that people looked to her as though they were in “a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages”—the faces seemed to be those of people now dead, which made her miss her own century, and the people she knew, and the real light of day.) As more of the sun is covered, its light reaches us less directly. “Much of the light that you will be getting is light that has been scattered by the atmosphere from ten to twenty miles away,” Close said. Thus the color shift.

He showed me the equipment that he has used to watch six eclipses: a piece of cardboard about the size of an LP sleeve, with a square cut out of the middle, covered by dark glass. “I used gaffer tape to affix a piece of welder’s glass,” he said. There are small holes at the edge of the board, so he can see how shadows change as the moon eclipses more, and then less, of the sun. When sunlight comes from a crescent rather than from a circle, shadows become elongated along one axis and narrowed along another. “If you spread out your fingers, and look at the shadow of your hand, your fingers will look crablike, as if they have claws on them,” Close said.

Each eclipse Close has seen has been distinct. On a boat in the South Seas, the moon appeared more greenish black than black, “because of reflected light from the water,” he said. In the Sahara, the millions of square miles of sand acted as a mirror, so it was less dark, and Close could see earthshine making the formations on the moon’s surface visible. At another eclipse, he found himself focussed on the appearance of the light of the sun as it really is: white. “We think of it as yellow, but of course that’s just atmospheric scattering, the same mechanism that makes the sky appear blue,” he said. When he travelled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his family, in 2017, his seven-year-old grandson said, half a minute before totality, that the asphalt road was “moving.” “It was these subtle bands of darker and lighter, moving along at walking pace. The effect it gave to your eye was that you thought the pavement was rippling,” Close said. He had never seen that before.

The moon doesn’t emit light; it only reflects it, like a mirror. In Oscar Wilde’s play “ Salomé ,” each character sees in the moon something of what he fears, or desires. The etymology of “eclipse” connects to the Greek word for failure, and for leaving, for abandonment. In Chinese, the word for eclipse comes from the term that also means “to eat,” likely a reference to the millennia-old description of solar eclipses happening when a dragon consumes the sun. If the moon is a mirror, then the moon during a solar eclipse is a dark and magic mirror.

A Hindu myth explains eclipses through the story of Svabhanu, who steals a sip of the nectar of the gods. The Sun and the Moon tell Vishnu, one of the most powerful of the gods. Vishnu decapitates Svabhanu, but not before he can swallow the sip of nectar. The nectar has made his head, now called Rahu, immortal. As revenge, Rahu periodically eats the Sun—creating eclipses. But, his throat being cut, he can’t swallow the Sun, so it reëmerges again and again. Rahu is in the wrong, obviously, but in ancient representations of him he is often grinning. To me, he looks mischievous rather than frightening.

The first story I can remember reading that featured an eclipse is Mark Twain’s “ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court .” The wizard Merlin imprisons an engineer named Hank Morgan, who has accidentally travelled from nineteenth-century America to sixth-century Camelot. Morgan, a man who dresses and acts strangely for the sixth century, finds himself, as one would, sentenced to be burned at the stake. But he gets out of it—by convincing others that he is the cause of an eclipse that he knew would occur. As seems only natural for a beloved American story, it’s the (man from the) future that wins this particular standoff, over the ancient ways of Merlin.

To Close, the beginning of an eclipse feels like “a curtains-up statement from the heavens: Science works. Come back in an hour.” He finds it particularly moving that someone, using only measurements and reason, and the laws of celestial motion, could have predicted the April 8th eclipse down to the minute, maybe to the second. The eclipse that surprised the warring Medes and Lydians into peace may not have been a surprise to all; it is said to have been predicted by Thales of Miletus.

I asked Close if he’d ever met someone on his eclipse journeys who wasn’t much impressed. He said no. Still, it’s possible that I and my mirror friend both have the right intuition about this experience we’ve never had. In the last chapter of Roberto Bolaño’s novella “French Comedy of Horrors,” the young narrator witnesses an eclipse while at a soda fountain with his friends; he also witnesses the people around him witnessing the eclipse, including a couple doing a dance “that was somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying.” On his way home, he answers a ringing pay phone and finds himself in a lengthy conversation with a stranger who claims to be a member of the Clandestine Surrealist Group, writers living in Paris’s sewer system. The stranger invites the narrator (who wants desperately to be a poet) to join them, at an appointed time and place, months into the future—but says that they can’t pay for his ticket.

His whole eclipse day is banal (soda fountain, pay phone, the price of things) but also tempting, literally surreal, and like a dream. When our hero finally makes it home, at dawn, he sees Achille, the local drunk. Achille tells him that “the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day.” Nature’s everyday wonders might be the more clandestine ones. ♦

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Seven studies from researchers at the prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have been retracted over the last two months after a scientist blogger alleged that images used in them had been manipulated or duplicated.

The retractions are the latest development in a monthslong controversy around research at the Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. 

The issue came to light after Sholto David, a microbiologist and volunteer science sleuth based in Wales, published a scathing post on his blog in January, alleging errors and manipulations of images across dozens of papers produced primarily by Dana-Farber researchers . The institute acknowledged errors and subsequently announced that it had requested six studies to be retracted and asked for corrections in 31 more papers. Dana-Farber also said, however, that a review process for errors had been underway before David’s post. 

Now, at least one more study has been retracted than Dana-Farber initially indicated, and David said he has discovered an additional 30 studies from authors affiliated with the institute that he believes contain errors or image manipulations and therefore deserve scrutiny.

The episode has imperiled the reputation of a major cancer research institute and raised questions about one high-profile researcher there, Kenneth Anderson, who is a senior author on six of the seven retracted studies. 

Anderson is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana-Farber. He did not respond to multiple emails or voicemails requesting comment. 

The retractions and new allegations add to a larger, ongoing debate in science about how to protect scientific integrity and reduce the incentives that could lead to misconduct or unintentional mistakes in research. 

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has moved relatively swiftly to seek retractions and corrections. 

“Dana-Farber is deeply committed to a culture of accountability and integrity, and as an academic research and clinical care organization we also prioritize transparency,” Dr. Barrett Rollins, the institute’s integrity research officer, said in a statement. “However, we are bound by federal regulations that apply to all academic medical centers funded by the National Institutes of Health among other federal agencies. Therefore, we cannot share details of internal review processes and will not comment on personnel issues.”

The retracted studies were originally published in two journals: One in the Journal of Immunology and six in Cancer Research. Six of the seven focused on multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that develops in plasma cells. Retraction notices indicate that Anderson agreed to the retractions of the papers he authored.

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and longtime image sleuth, reviewed several of the papers’ retraction statements and scientific images for NBC News and said the errors were serious. 

“The ones I’m looking at all have duplicated elements in the photos, where the photo itself has been manipulated,” she said, adding that these elements were “signs of misconduct.” 

Dr.  John Chute, who directs the division of hematology and cellular therapy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and has contributed to studies about multiple myeloma, said the papers were produced by pioneers in the field, including Anderson. 

“These are people I admire and respect,” he said. “Those were all high-impact papers, meaning they’re highly read and highly cited. By definition, they have had a broad impact on the field.” 

Chute said he did not know the authors personally but had followed their work for a long time.

“Those investigators are some of the leading people in the field of myeloma research and they have paved the way in terms of understanding our biology of the disease,” he said. “The papers they publish lead to all kinds of additional work in that direction. People follow those leads and industry pays attention to that stuff and drug development follows.”

The retractions offer additional evidence for what some science sleuths have been saying for years: The more you look for errors or image manipulation, the more you might find, even at the top levels of science. 

Scientific images in papers are typically used to present evidence of an experiment’s results. Commonly, they show cells or mice; other types of images show key findings like western blots — a laboratory method that identifies proteins — or bands of separated DNA molecules in gels. 

Science sleuths sometimes examine these images for irregular patterns that could indicate errors, duplications or manipulations. Some artificial intelligence companies are training computers to spot these kinds of problems, as well. 

Duplicated images could be a sign of sloppy lab work or data practices. Manipulated images — in which a researcher has modified an image heavily with photo editing tools — could indicate that images have been exaggerated, enhanced or altered in an unethical way that could change how other scientists interpret a study’s findings or scientific meaning. 

Top scientists at big research institutions often run sprawling laboratories with lots of junior scientists. Critics of science research and publishing systems allege that a lack of opportunities for young scientists, limited oversight and pressure to publish splashy papers that can advance careers could incentivize misconduct. 

These critics, along with many science sleuths, allege that errors or sloppiness are too common , that research organizations and authors often ignore concerns when they’re identified, and that the path from complaint to correction is sluggish. 

“When you look at the amount of retractions and poor peer review in research today, the question is, what has happened to the quality standards we used to think existed in research?” said Nick Steneck, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan and an expert on science integrity.

David told NBC News that he had shared some, but not all, of his concerns about additional image issues with Dana-Farber. He added that he had not identified any problems in four of the seven studies that have been retracted. 

“It’s good they’ve picked up stuff that wasn’t in the list,” he said. 

NBC News requested an updated tally of retractions and corrections, but Ellen Berlin, a spokeswoman for Dana-Farber, declined to provide a new list. She said that the numbers could shift and that the institute did not have control over the form, format or timing of corrections. 

“Any tally we give you today might be different tomorrow and will likely be different a week from now or a month from now,” Berlin said. “The point of sharing numbers with the public weeks ago was to make clear to the public that Dana-Farber had taken swift and decisive action with regard to the articles for which a Dana-Farber faculty member was primary author.” 

She added that Dana-Farber was encouraging journals to correct the scientific record as promptly as possible. 

Bik said it was unusual to see a highly regarded U.S. institution have multiple papers retracted. 

“I don’t think I’ve seen many of those,” she said. “In this case, there was a lot of public attention to it and it seems like they’re responding very quickly. It’s unusual, but how it should be.”

Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at [email protected].

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What Solar Eclipse-Gazing Has Looked Like for the Past 2 Centuries

Millions of people on Monday will continue the tradition of experiencing and capturing solar eclipses, a pursuit that has spawned a lot of unusual gear.

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By Sarah Eckinger

• April 8, 2024

For centuries, people have been clamoring to glimpse solar eclipses. From astronomers with custom-built photographic equipment to groups huddled together with special glasses, this spectacle has captivated the human imagination.

Creating a Permanent Record

In 1860, Warren de la Rue captured what many sources describe as the first photograph of a total solar eclipse . He took it in Rivabellosa, Spain, with an instrument known as the Kew Photoheliograph . This combination of a telescope and camera was specifically built to photograph the sun.

Forty years later, Nevil Maskelyne, a magician and an astronomy enthusiast, filmed a total solar eclipse in North Carolina. The footage was lost, however, and only released in 2019 after it was rediscovered in the Royal Astronomical Society’s archives.

Telescopic Vision

For scientists and astronomers, eclipses provide an opportunity not only to view the moon’s umbra and gaze at the sun’s corona, but also to make observations that further their studies. Many observatories, or friendly neighbors with a telescope, also make their instruments available to the public during eclipses.

Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen, Fridtjof Nansen and Sigurd Scott Hansen observing a solar eclipse while on a polar expedition in 1894 .

Women from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and their professor tested out equipment ahead of their eclipse trip (to “catch old Sol in the act,” as the original New York Times article phrased it) to New London, Conn., in 1922.

A group from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania traveled to Yerbaniz, Mexico, in 1923, with telescopes and a 65-foot camera to observe the sun’s corona .

Dr. J.J. Nassau, director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, prepared to head to Douglas Hill, Maine, to study an eclipse in 1932. An entire freight car was required to transport the institution’s equipment.

Visitors viewed a solar eclipse at an observatory in Berlin in the mid-1930s.

A family set up two telescopes in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1963. The two children placed stones on the base to help steady them.

An astronomer examined equipment for an eclipse in a desert in Mauritania in June 1973. We credit the hot climate for his choice in outfit.

Indirect Light

If you see people on Monday sprinting to your local park clutching pieces of paper, or with a cardboard box of their head, they are probably planning to reflect or project images of the solar eclipse onto a surface.

Cynthia Goulakos demonstrated a safe way to view a solar eclipse , with two pieces of cardboard to create a reflection of the shadowed sun, in Lowell, Mass., in 1970.

Another popular option is to create a pinhole camera. This woman did so in Central Park in 1963 by using a paper cup with a small hole in the bottom and a twin-lens reflex camera.

Amateur astronomers viewed a partial eclipse, projected from a telescope onto a screen, from atop the Empire State Building in 1967 .

Back in Central Park, in 1970, Irving Schwartz and his wife reflected an eclipse onto a piece of paper by holding binoculars on the edge of a garbage basket.

Children in Denver in 1979 used cardboard viewing boxes and pieces of paper with small pinholes to view projections of a partial eclipse.

A crowd gathered around a basin of water dyed with dark ink, waiting for the reflection of a solar eclipse to appear, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1995.

Staring at the Sun (or, How Not to Burn Your Retinas)

Eclipse-gazers have used different methods to protect their eyes throughout the years, some safer than others .

In 1927, women gathered at a window in a building in London to watch a total eclipse through smoked glass. This was popularized in France in the 1700s , but fell out of favor when physicians began writing papers on children whose vision was damaged.

Another trend was to use a strip of exposed photographic film, as seen below in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 and in Turkana, Kenya, in 1963. This method, which was even suggested by The Times in 1979 , has since been declared unsafe.

Solar eclipse glasses are a popular and safe way to view the event ( if you use models compliant with international safety standards ). Over the years there have been various styles, including these large hand-held options found in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1979.

Parents and children watched a partial eclipse through their eclipse glasses in Tokyo in 1981.

Slimmer, more colorful options were used in Nabusimake, Colombia, in 1998.

In France in 1999.

And in Iran and England in 1999.

And the best way to see the eclipse? With family and friends at a watch party, like this one in Isalo National Park in Madagascar in 2001.

Environmental Science: Advances

2023 outstanding papers published in the environmental science journals of the royal society of chemistry.

a Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China

b Carnegie Mellon University Department of Chemistry, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

c Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

d Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK

e Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal

f Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

g Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

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• This article is part of the themed collections: Outstanding Papers of 2023 from RSC’s Environmental Science journals and Outstanding Papers 2023 – Environmental Science: Advances

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2024 Ethics Essay Contest winners announced

Claire Martino , a junior from New Berlin, Wis., majoring in applied mathematics and data science, is the winner of the 2024 Ethics Essay Contest for the essay "Artificial Intelligence Could Probably Write This Essay Better than Me."

The second place entry was from Morgan J. Janes , a junior from Rock Island, Ill., majoring in biology, for the essay "The Relevant History and Medical and Ethical Future Viability of Xenotransplantation."

Third place went to Alyssa Scudder , a senior from Lee, Ill., majoring in biology, for the essay "The Ethicality of Gene Alteration in Human Embryos."

Dr. Dan Lee announced the winners on behalf of the board of directors of the Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics, sponsor of the contest. The winner will receive an award of $100, the second-place winner an award of $50, and the third-place winner an award of $25.

Honorable mentions went to Grace Palmer , a senior art and accounting double major from Galesburg, Ill., for the essay "The Ethiopian Coffee Trade: Is Positive Change Brewing?" and Sarah Marrs , a sophomore from Carpentersville, Ill., majoring in political science and women, gender and sexuality studies, for the essay "Dating Apps as an Outlet to Promote Sexual Autonomy among Disabled Individuals: an Intersectional Approach to Change."

The winning essays will be published in Augustana Digital Commons .

The Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics was established to enrich the teaching-learning experiences for students by providing greater opportunities for them to meet and interact with community leaders and to encourage discussions of issues of ethical significance through campus programs and community outreach.

Dr. Lee, whose teaching responsibilities since joining the Augustana faculty in 1974 have included courses in ethics, serves as the center's director.

If you have news, send it to [email protected] ! We love hearing about the achievements of our alumni, students and faculty.

Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Travel and Tourism Industry — The History of Moscow City

The History of Moscow City

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• What to see
• Monuments and attractions

Known for its striking buildings - as large as they are elegant - Red Square is the heart and soul not just of Moscow but of Russia as a whole , and it is home to some of the city's most iconic monuments.

Standing in Red Square and taking in the architecture around you, it's quite common to think the city square was named for its red brick buildings, or perhaps as a reference to the Communist government that ruled the country for most of the 20th century. However, the Russian word for red - krasnaya - is very similar to the word for beautiful - krasivaya - the original name for the plaza.

Throughout the years, Moscow's beautiful Red Square has played witnessed to many significant events that have marked the course of Russian history .

What to see in Red Square

The famous city square is surrounded by four impressive buildings. One of the most important, and a symbol of the country as a whole, is the spectacular  Saint Basil's Cathedral . The bright colours and exquisite details of its architecture are sure to leave you speechless.

On the side of the square opposite to the Cathedral is the imposing red building housing Moscow's State Historical Museum , and next to it you'll find the Kazan Cathedral . This small, fairytale-looking church is actually a recreation of one that was demolished by the Soviet government to make way for tanks and celebrating workers.

One of long sides of Red Square borders the Kremlin , and in front of its impenetrable red wall is the curious structure housing Lenin's Mausoleum . Facing them is the GUM , an elegant department store that was built by the Tsars, then nationalised under the Soviets. Nowadays it is a luxury shopping arcade.

Its emblematic architecture and the huge number of important monuments located here make Red Square an unmissable visit on your trip to Moscow! 

In the centre of Moscow.

Closest metro : Ploschad' Rovulyutsii (line 3, blue).

You may also be interested in

The Kremlin - a historical fortified citadel, and the religious and politcal nucleus of the city - is at the heart of Moscow and is one of Russia's most emblematic sights.

Pushkin Museum

Located in the heart of Moscow, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art is one of the most important in Russia, home to an enormous collection of paintings, sculptures, archaeological objects and more.