Call an Aesthetician: How Do We Know What is Beautiful?

From the Archive: We know it when we see it, but we don't really know what it is

Artist's Shit, 1961. Piero Manzoni

I’ve worked as a journalist and editor in the beauty industry for around ten years now. I should stress, as you might suspect, that this doesn’t give me much understanding of what beauty actually is. The industry operates upon a sort of vague collective understanding of what a beautiful person looks, feels and smells like, but it doesn’t question what beauty is on a deep conceptual level. There is no real reason for it to. While it sometimes dabbles, mostly for marketing clout, in sociological questions about beauty standards and expanding the consensus to include more varied ideas of the beautiful, there is no time for questioning what beauty actually is. It wouldn’t be practical to do it – talking about concepts without consensus for two thousand years is what philosophers are for. It also wouldn’t make any money and might not help in manufacturing a really excellent eyebrow gel.

Really, aesthetics is the philosophy of art, which of course has a strong relationship with beauty, and took that name – aesthetics, after the Greek word for sensation, aesthesis – at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Through the history of philosophy, there have been many impactful theories on what beauty is and what makes something beautiful. Plato heavily influenced the Christian tradition which provides the cultural context for our own Western norms and culture. According to this idea, beauty is a value in itself, and one of the three which explain our rational inclinations, along with truth and goodness. This view gave rise to the popular idea that beauty is something we desire, pursue and value for its own sake, because it is in some sense coded in our being as rational creatures. It later translated into the Renaissance-era obsession with beauty, and the sometimes slightly dodgy conflation of beauty with purity and goodness that still has hangovers in our current beliefs about beauty.

You know something beautiful when you encounter it. You can feel it in your body, but it is not merely a physical experience. Beauty is emotional, which may articulate itself through subtle physical changes, like pupils dilating, or quite extreme ones, like a jolt to the gut. Not every experience of beauty is like this, however. This is closer to a description of what is called ‘the sublime’ in aesthetics; an overwhelming and otherworldly encounter which is the pinnacle of beauty-based experience. In line with his era in aesthetics, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose work is incredibly interesting but who always struck me as something of a wet lettuce, said that that which is beautiful is, in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton “that which pleases immediately, and without concepts”. This seems to suggest that a sort of deep metaphysical connection is made within us, or between us and something in the world, when we encounter beauty – something beyond ideas or thought. This may be an accurate description of the pseudo-religious experience of the sublime, but it is rather limiting if you extend it to other, slightly more ordinary kinds of beauty. It isn’t how I feel about an especially attractive lipstick, for example.

There is some logic to the idea that we desire beauty for its own sake. When you go to a bakery and choose a loaf of bread or one of those fancy little cakes that call to something deep in your soul, you’ll invariably pick one over the others. The most beautiful one. The crustiest-looking, most golden and fragrant loaf. The most symmetrical, spongiest, and most perfectly iced of the cakes. The chubbiest and most glossily glazed of the raspberry donuts. With food, you might suggest that we want these because their good looks, textures and smells imply that they’ll be the tastiest (if he were particularly hungry, Plato might agree), but we often desire things that are beautiful just because they are. A ring with a light-reflective topaz stone. An elegant taper candle. One sleek-looking car over another similarly functioning one. Certainly, there are corollaries of beauty – elegance being one – which are not precisely the same thing as beauty, or perhaps belong in a sub-category of beauty, but that seems like a rabbit hole for another time.

What we might practically focus on is the extent to which our own individual concept of beauty actually is organically, authentically ours. A glance through the filtered faces and wicker-forested white living rooms of Instagram is sufficient to suggest that a good deal of our concept of beauty is actually about consensus and social signalling. In his fascinating little volume Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton says “Nevertheless, you want the table, the room, or the website to look right, and looking right matters in the way that beauty generally matters – not by pleasing the eye only, but by conveying meanings and values which have weight for you and which you are consciously putting on display.” It prompts the question – ‘Do I find this beautiful because I think others do, or because it complies with fashion, or do I really just find it beautiful for its own sake?’ So much of ‘taste’, particularly in art and aesthetics, is about signalling belonging to a certain social class, or gender, or identity group.

If you are currently looking to your floor, at that white and black geometric rug that everyone shares photos of on Instagram, don’t worry too much. Consensus is powerful and important. Fashion is the most immediately translatable way that we express consensus within the aesthetic sphere. As Scruton puts it “Even those who dress so as to stand out and draw attention to themselves do so in order that others should recognise their intention.” Fashion is to some extent unavoidable, either in the breach or the observance. You might remember that famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada, in which Anna Wintouresque Editor-in-Chief Miranda Priestley, played by Meryl Streep, explains with withering disdain to the film’s protagonist Andy, an equally disdainful assistant who thinks she exists outside fashion, essentially that her concept of beauty and value is not fully Andy’s own –  “that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”” In this sense, we are all subject to tastemakers who decide not what is beautiful or tasteful (though this conflation is often made), but what we should find beautiful or tasteful.

Concepts of beauty have changed radically over time, of course, and the modern idea often equates beauty with utility – quite a departure from that former, but still culturally lingering, concept of beauty as a good in itself. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century American architect Louis Sullivan is one of the great modern influences on this. He argued that architecture is beautiful when ‘form follows function’. By this he meant that we experience the beauty of a building or a space when we experience how its function both creates and is expressed by its architectural features. This ‘form follows function’ mantra has been a mainstay of Western post-war architecture and has trickled into the utility-first minimal aesthetic of our time. We still equate beauty with goodness of a sort, we have just changed what beauty is. By Sullivan’s definition, a building which is an affront to the senses might be thought beautiful, because it is functional. This is essentially what brutalist architecture is. Like artist Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work, ‘Artist’s Shit’ (google it, but if you’re inclined to interpret the name literally, you’re not wrong), it is a deliberate inversion of the concept of beauty. When people say that they find brutalism’s austere and imposing concrete structures or a can of poo beautiful, I always wonder what they mean by the word. If they mean ‘aligns with my values’, or ‘is functional’, I can see what they mean. It’s quite far from a Bernini sculpture or the smooth crimson scream of a good lipstick, though. Quite far.