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This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances—such as thought experiments and visual aids—and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories.

Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding.

The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 20  pages, introduction to the volume, chapter 2 | 15  pages, epistemic gatekeepers, chapter 3 | 27  pages, getting the picture, chapter 4 | 23  pages, imagination, aesthetic feelings, and scientific reasoning, chapter 5 | 18  pages, beauty, truth and understanding, chapter 6 | 21  pages, a plea for the sublime in science, chapter 7 | 21  pages, how can loveliness be a guide to truth inference to the best explanation and exemplars, chapter 8 | 21  pages, the aesthetic and literary qualities of scientific thought experiments, chapter 9 | 19  pages, epistemic radicals and the vice of arrogance as a counterfeit to the virtue of assured epistemic ambition, chapter 10 | 25  pages, performance and practice.

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Poincaré’s aesthetics of science

• Published: 16 March 2016
• Volume 194 , pages 2581–2594, ( 2017 )

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• Milena Ivanova 1  

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This paper offers a systematic analysis of Poincaré’s understanding of beauty in science. In particular, the paper examines the epistemic significance Poincaré attributes to aesthetic judgement by reconstructing and analysing his arguments on simplicity and unity in science. I offer a consistent reconstruction of Poincaré’s account and show that for Poincaré simplicity and unity are regulative principles, linked to the aim of science—that of achieving understanding of how phenomena relate. I show how Poincaré’s account of beauty in science can be incorporated within his wider philosophy of science.

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Outline of a Theory of Scientific Aesthetics

Schiller’s Aesthetics: Beauty Is Freedom

Hegel on Art and Aesthetics

It is interesting to consider whether these particular properties are sought after in all scientific disciplines or whether they are particularly valued in physics and the mathematical sciences.

There is also a debate concerning whether aesthetic judgements are indeed aesthetic. Todd ( 2008 ) argues that aesthetic judgements are epistemic because they are associated with normative claims.

Poincaré’s argument here is an instance of non-eliminative instrumentalism. Mach ( 1984 ), on the other hand, endorses an eliminative instrumentalism, arguing that “all metaphysical elements are to be eliminated as superfluous and as destructive of the economy of science” (Mach 1984 , p. xxxviii).

Note here that Poincaré uses ‘harmony’ and ‘unity’ both as properties of theories and of the phenomena, and that he takes harmony to reduce to unity.

While there is no explicit reference to Kant’s aesthetic theory in Poincaré’s writing, a middle position between objectivism and subjectivism would imply a Kantian influence here. According to Kant, aesthetic judgements depend on the subject’s reflection on the object rather than in some property in the object itself. However, Kant claims that rather than being completely subjective emotional responses, aesthetic judgements demand the agreement of others and thus have intersubjective validity (Kant 2000 ).

Note the parallels and differences here with Poincaré’s contemporary Pierre Duhem. While Duhem argues that aesthetic values such as ‘simplicity’ and ‘elegance’ “are essentially subjective, contingent, and variable with time, with schools, and with persons” (Duhem 1954 , p. 288), there is still a need to explain how scientists come to an agreement about the aesthetic properties of theories. Just like David Hume, Duhem appeals to the concept of ‘good sense’, which an impartial scientist possesses. Duhem argues that scientists who have good sense can appreciate the aesthetic properties of theories because they are unbiased and objective. It is good sense that ensures that despite the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment, scientists with good sense can come to an objective agreement about the aesthetic properties of theories [see Stump ( 2007 ) and Ivanova ( 2010 )].

‘Nature’ is to be understood here as the objects of our experience.

Morrison ( 2008 ) investigates the relationship between the unification project in contemporary physics and Kant’s account of unification in the sciences.

For a detailed discussion of Poincaré’s account of creativity, see Livingston ( 2009 ).

While opposing the atomic hypothesis for the majority of his life, Poincaré accepted the atom in 1912 claiming that there is sufficient experimental evidence for its existence. He draws ( 1963 [1913]) an important distinction between the ‘metaphysical’ atom, which is supposed to be indivisible and unifying, and ‘the atom of the chemist’, for which there is sufficient evidence but which has proven to lead to more complexity. For more details on Poincaré’s argument, see Stump ( 1989 ) and Ivanova ( 2013 ).

According to structural realism, we can know the relations between unobservable entities, but not their properties (their nature). We can differentiate three mutually exclusive views regarding unobservable entities, which structural realists can endorse. A structural realist can be (1) agnostic as to whether there are unobservable entities. Or, (2) she can hold that there are unobservable entities, but our epistemic restriction does not allow us to know their ’nature’ (that is, their first order properties). Or (3) a structural realist can employ the argument for coherence between epistemology and metaphysics and suggest that since all we can know is relations and not the entities themselves, then we should eliminate the unobservable entities from our ontology. This version is compatible with Ladyman’s ( 1998 ) ontic structural realism.

Ivanova ( 2015 ) has recently defined several different meanings of the term conventionalism associated with Poincaré’s position and related it to his structuralism and neo-Kantianism.

While Poincaré continued endorsing the synthetic a priori , he ‘corrected’ the Kantian framework in light of the existence of non-Euclidean geometries by claiming that they have conventional and not synthetic a priori status. Ben-Menahem ( 2006 ) gives a detailed account of Poincaré’s conventionalism, while Friedman ( 1999 ) explains the neo-Kantian elements in Poincaré’s epistemology. What concerns me here are the similarities between Poincaré’s and Kant’s theories of aesthetic judgement, that have not yet been noted in the literature.

An exception is Massimi ( 2011 ) who develops an internalist neo-Kantian form of structural realism. Massimi claims that unobservable entities, and mathematical structures evolve together in relation to empirical evidence. Our best scientific theories do not represent a mind-independent reality (unobservable entities that exist independently of us). On the contrary, the unobservable entities, the mathematical structures evolve with the development of scientific knowledge. Massimi’s position can be seen as a much more helpful way of thinking about Poincaré’s own position in the scientific realism debate.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments, as well as the audiences at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Universities of Helsinki, Rome and Konstanz. Matt Farr deserves special thanks for his support and encouragement during the time in which this paper was written. I dedicate this work to Dr. Domenika Turkiewicz and the team at the Mater Breast Cancer Center in Brisbane for their great care.

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Ivanova, M. Poincaré’s aesthetics of science. Synthese 194 , 2581–2594 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1069-1

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Received : 17 October 2015

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1069-1

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Science of beauty? Theories of proportion from the 16th to the 20th century

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This thesis attempts to elucidate the relationship between science and beauty by examining theories of proportion in art and architecture from the 16th to the 20th century. It follows the hypothesis that these theories reflect the intellectual conflict between phenomena and spirit (or sense and substance, appearance and essence) as postulated by Eric Voegelin as the result of the rise of modern mathematics and physics since the second half of the 16th century , leading ultimately to "scientism" (or the bias accorded to the mathematized study of natural phenomena as the only means of comprehending reality, even to the extreme of denying the reality of spiritual substance itself) in the 19th century. It begins by reviewing the concept of proportion (a word translated by Cicero from the Greek analogial since its transformation from Greek philosophy to the Vitruvian interpretations, and continues with exposition of the major theoreticians since the 16th century, divulging connections of the problem with various scientific (or pseudo-scientific) practices which include anatomy, astrology, physiognomy, science of expression, craniometry, biological morphology, statistics and music. The thesis also tries to situate these work within the main-stream theoretical debates in art and architecture, exploring their significance in the philosophical shaping of the concepts of decorum, character, taste and eventually the 'science' of aesthetics. It illustrates in its entirety, therefore, the evolution of the struggle over the question whether a science of beauty )i': .',r. is possible with regard to proportion, which might serve to explain not only the crisis condition in art and architecture at present (the fact that some of these proportional theories were determined by human or natural scientists in the 18th and 19th century rather than artists and architects is evidence of this crisis) but would contribute also to the understanding of the history of human civilisation put at peril by scientism.

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This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions regarding scientific creativity and imagination, the status of scientific performances—such as thought experiments and visual aids—and the role of aesthetic considerations in the context of discovery and justification of scientific theories. Several contributions focus on the concept of beauty as employed by practising scientists, the aesthetic factors at play in science and their role in decision making. Other essays address the question of scientific creativity and how aesthetic judgment resolves the problem of theory choice by employing aesthetic criteria and incorporating insights from both objectivism and subjectivism. The volume also features original perspectives on the role of the sublime in science and sheds light on the empirical work studying the experience of the sublime in science and its relation to the experience of understanding. The Aesthetics of Science tackles these topics from a variety of novel and thought-provoking angles. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science and aesthetics, as well as other subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mathematics.

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Steven French is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. He is a co-editor of Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art (Routledge, 2017) and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . Milena Ivanova is Teaching Associate in the Department for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and Bye-Fellow at Fitzwilliam College

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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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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

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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Beauty in Literature: A collection of works

Ideas on beauty and what it means to be beautiful have changed over the years and this evolution has been documented throughout literature.

This collection comprises high quality literary criticism from our literature journals exploring the concept of beauty. The articles in the collection investigate a broad range of literary works from the ancient classics through to the twentieth century, and use the latest in English studies to interrogate the nature of beauty.

The collection is free to read until the end of October 2020.

American Literary History

Classical receptions journal, essays in criticism, isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, journal of victorian culture, literary imagination, melus: multi-ethnic literature of the united states, notes & queries, shakespeare quarterly, the cambridge quarterly, the review of english studies, forgetting auschwitz: jonathan littell and the death of a beautiful woman, the princess among the polemicists: aesthetics and protest at midcentury, 'third cheerleader from the left': from homer's helen to helen of troy, poppies, scarlet flowers, 'this beauty': h.d.'s choruses from the iphigeneia in aulis and the first world war, a short course of the belles lettres for keatsians, general and invariable ideas of nature: joshua reynolds and his critical descendants, 'wonder' and 'beauty' in the awkward age, beauty and the victorian body, the fate of beauty, "the can is beautiful, the road is ugly": edward abbey, kab, and the environmental aesthetics of litter, ironic pastorals and beautiful swamps: w.e.b. du bois and the troubled landscapes of the american south, 'one single ivory cell': oscar wilde and the brain, beautiful pictures of the lost homeland, beautiful houses built of brick and stone..., toward the "uncommonly beautiful": queer-of-color youth and "delectable deformity" in rakesh satyal's blue boy, gold-digger: reading the marital and national romance in bharati mukherjee's jasmine, 'beauty is in the eye of the gazer': an aphorism in jane eyre, interpreting the person: tradition, conflict, and cymbeline's imogen, on the origins of beauty: aesthetics and method in the works of charles darwin, the review of english studies prize essay: the meaning of the 'sublime and beautiful': shaftesburian contexts and rhetorical issues in edmund burke's philosophical enquiry, 'she was a queen, and therefore beautfiul': sidney, his mother, and queen elizabeth, william gilpin at the coast: a new perspective on picturesque travel writing, affiliations.

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Beauty Is Skin Deep; The Self-Perception of Adolescents and Young Women in Construction of Body Image within the Ankole Society

Ruth kaziga.

1 Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Mbarara 1410, Uganda; gu.ca.tsum@izugnuhcumc (C.M.); [email protected] (D.A.)

Charles Muchunguzi

Dorcus achen.

2 RHEA, Centre of Expertise on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality, Vrije Universitet Brussels, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Susan Kools

3 School of Nursing, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 800826, 202 Jeanette Lancaster Way, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA; ude.ainigriv@h9kms

Associated Data

Not applicable.

Introduction: Adolescents and young women become increasingly aware of their bodies through images presented to them through social structures during their developmental stage. These images may drive them toward unhealthy behaviors including overeating, starving, and skin bleaching. This paper is part of a study that examined the Older Adolescent Banyankole Girl’s Response to the socio-cultural constructions of body image in The Ankole Region, Uganda. It aimed to understand the self-perceptions of adolescent girls of their body image within Ankole society. Methods: The study collected narrative interviews of 30 adolescent and young adult females (16–24) recruited from various institutions of learning as well as the Ankole community of southwestern Uganda. Results: Adolescent girls’ perceptions of beauty were influenced by pull and push factors that included beauty expectations, beauty comparisons, relationships, and dietary habits that keep them oscillating between traditional and contemporary beauty ideals. Findings suggest that young women could benefit from social shifting of focus from physical appearance to other valuable developmental assets. Conclusion: Government-sponsored programs that provide education and positive media messages may be beneficial to building the self-esteem of young women.

1. Introduction

Several studies have found significant links between well-being and positive body image in adolescent girls and young women. From a very young age, they are told that how you look is important to them and others who look at them [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Cultures all over the world put women and girls’ bodies at the center of intrigue based on connotations attached to beauty such as goodliness and sexuality. Studies have showed that young girls may obsess over their appearance making other aspects of development less important, such as education or independence [ 3 ]. According to [ 4 , 5 ], girls may adopt unhealthy eating habits such as skipping meals at school and at home so as to strive for the Western standard of beauty that values slenderness. The study reveals that when adolescent girls are still going through the bodily changes of puberty, this makes it even more challenging for them to achieve the societal standards of female beauty.

In adolescent development, there are certain aspects in society that are fixed on how young people behave rather than simply the changes of a growing body or cognitive structures. Individualistic cultures in Europe and South Africa place more emphasis on self-esteem [ 6 ]. In contrast, in collectivist societies such as Uganda, self-perceptions of body image can be based on the societal norms. Studies show that social expectations have an influence on young peoples’ ideologies [ 7 ]. The study shows that the existing beauty standards in Ankole play a role in how young girls feel about their bodies.

With embedded norms with relevance to society of how one should look, overwhelming pressure is put on girls to conform, which in turn affects their self-esteem when they do or do not meet these norms [ 8 ]. Adolescent and young women (16–24) who are at the age of self-discovery have formed their perceptions of beauty images that are usually unattainable based on societal influences [ 9 ]. Research shows that there is an association between the social environment and the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts of individuals. These thoughts are usually passed on from parents, peers, and overt messages that encourage the “appearance culture” [ 10 ].

1.1. Aims of the Study

This study focused on the first objective of a PhD study on older adolescent Banyankole Girls’ Response to sociocultural construction of body image in The Ankole Region, Uganda. Its purpose was to explore perceptions of body image and how adolescent girls responded to these perceptions in Ankole. A secondary aim was to explore the lives of adolescents and young women who are candidates for marriage and advanced society roles in Uganda, and live at the crossroads as to which society’s body image ideals they should ascribe to; either the traditional and conservative or the modern and liberal societies.

The study was guided by socio-cultural theory [ 11 ] supplemented by Foucault’s theory of the body [ 12 , 13 ] and Higgins’ self-discrepancy theory [ 14 ]. The socio-cultural theory elucidates the importance of societal norms and their influence on young people’s cognitive perceptions of the body. Adolescent girls and young women in the study are shown to react toward society’s view of appearance; for example, in the traditions put in place, we see the rural Ankole society encouraging female fattening. Furthermore, the media encourage women to adhere to expectations of beauty. Foucault’s theory of the body explains the ethos surrounding the female body image from the past notion of its sole biological purpose and sexuality, which has been used to oppress women [ 12 , 15 ]. Higgins self-discrepancy theory points out that young people’s self-perceptions are influenced by comparisons with others.

1.2. Background and Significance

In societies across Africa, female beauty ideals have been used to explain perceptions of one’s fertility, gender role identity for women, and the distribution of economic and political power in society [ 16 ]. Perceptions regarding beauty and body types vary between cultures across the world and have changed significantly across history [ 6 ]. In the past, most African countries beauty standards of women reflected a husband and father’s wealth and power, and this standard is still sought after; for example, in the Efik of Calabar cross river state in Nigeria, fat women symbolize fertility and well-being [ 16 ]. While studies underscore that many traditional societies covet fat as a sign of wealth and health [ 16 ], others show that some of the contemporary societies in Europe, Asia, and North America encourage slenderness among young women as shown through media [ 3 , 9 ].

In pre-colonial times, Ankore was a part of the Chwezi empire the ruled the Great Lake’s region of East Africa, which is now in southwestern Uganda [ 17 ]. It was a traditional kingdom that was abolished in 1967 by President Milton Obote and has not been officially restored. While the kingdom was abolished, people continue to maintain this cultural identity [ 15 , 17 ]. This society has two groups subgroups within Ankole culture with a common ancestry: the Bairu and Bahima. Both ethnic groups’ standard of beauty is characterized by a slender nose, thin lips, finely-shaped heads, fat backsides, and fat legs [ 18 ]. According to [ 16 , 19 ], in Ankole culture, the beauty standard is fat. A fat body composition for the Ankole woman has been traditionally indicative of fertility, sexuality, and morality. Body image for Ankole women is also tied to moral norms [ 18 ]. Among the Bahima of Ankore, there is a beauty ritual of female fattening during adolescence to ensure that their women develop to be fat. Fattening among women engenders a great sense of respect within and outside of the family [ 16 ]. Fattening is similar to the past practice of the Bairu in Ankole, in which for preparation of marriage, young women are bulked up to the size of a millet basket [ 18 ].

While these traditional practices looked to fatness as a symbol of beauty in Ankole, the trend for young women has begun to shift in the contemporary world. Research and the press [ 4 , 20 ] have shown that over time, beauty trends in Uganda have changed due to Westernized views on what it means to be beautiful; therefore, this has encouraged many girls and young women to maintain an unhealthy body weight, as well as the practice of fattening. The young women have adopted the global standards that idealize being thin and curvy. Women and girls are starving themselves and bleaching their skin to match the Westernized images in the media [ 4 ]. These changing trends may put young women at risk for self-hatred toward their bodies [ 4 , 5 ].

Although young women of Uganda have more recently embraced the thin ideal of beauty from the West, tradition is still an important factor of growing up [ 4 ]. Some young women, especially those in the rural areas, still look to fatness as the beauty ideal. This has led to the failure of many rural girls to maintain a healthy body size, resulting in health risks such as obesity and cardiovascular disease [ 21 ]. Research suggests that girls who struggle with a negative self-esteem are more likely susceptible to harmful societal messages and struggle with body dissatisfaction [ 1 ]. A negative body image is not only connected to low self-esteem and decreased well-being, but it is also related to serious long-term psychological consequences, such as depression, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, and poor performance in school [ 4 ].

2. Materials and Methods

A phenomenology research design was used, collecting and analyzing young women’s stories from their lived experiences [ 5 , 22 ]. By directly querying individuals about their lives, this research design allowed for the exploration of the range of subjective experiences young people have. Through triangulation of interview data with field notes of observations of the young women in their urban and rural community contexts, the researcher focused on past and current experiences of participants related to the influence of sociocultural factors and how they have influenced their thought process about their bodies over time [ 2 ].

The sample included 30 adolescent and young adult girls, both in school (high school and universities) and out of school in the age range of 16 to 24. In this study, 16–18-year-olds were considered to be in the developmental phase of late adolescence, while 19–24-year-olds were considered to be young or emerging adults. In Uganda, these ages include school-going people and those out of school and already married [ 23 ]. Young people both in and out of school were sampled, as it was assumed that those in school may be shown to be more influenced by peers and educators, while those with less or no form of formal education may be largely influenced by traditional norms and families [ 23 ]. Participants that identify as married are shown to be largely influenced by their spouse/significant other. This sample represented the nine districts of a southwestern region of Uganda. Among the participants, 5 adolescents and 7 young women were from the urban regions of Mbarara and Kampala, while 2 adolescents and young women were selected from each of the 9 rural districts of Ankole, respectively. All were of the Ankole culture.

Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants from universities, workplaces, and communities, where a notice was posted to encourage research volunteers to take part in the study. Snowball sampling was based on referrals from participants [ 24 ]. Participants from high schools were recruited by the head teacher; then, the selected students would refer other students. While recruitment from the community was based on telephone and face-to-face recruitment, those selected would then refer other participants. The inclusion criteria were that participants were between the ages of 16 and 24 years of age and had to belong to the Banyankole tribe.

Data collection procedures. Research assistants and the first author conducted semi-structured interviews in communities and workplaces of participants in the location they preferred. Interviews lasted between forty-five minutes and an hour and half. The interview questions were organized around the objectives of the study and included questions such as “How would you describe a beautiful woman in the Ankole culture?” “Considering your body and the way it looks, how do you fit within the Ankole culture beauty standards?” (see Appendix A for Interview Guide). Saturation was reached when participants gave no new information and themes were exhausted. Field notes were made on observations during the interview by research assistants and the first author, including the context where the interview took place and the nonverbal behavior of the participants in response to the questions. Observations were made on how participants approached the interview sessions and their reactions toward certain interview questions, especially those that triggered them. Observations were also made at the Ankole museum of Uganda, where different artifacts on traditional beauty in Ankole are displayed. The data were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim with participants identified with numbers to protect confidentiality.

Data analysis. Transcripts and field notes were coded manually to formulate themes using the process of thematic analysis as described by [ 25 ]. The goal of thematic analysis was to derive themes that were able to explain and address the study aims [ 26 ]. By using the six phases of thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke (2012), interview transcripts were read multiple times to develop an understanding of the participants’ experiences, highlighting information that stood out and making notes against the data.

Coding was done manually by the first author on a hard copy of the transcript. A hybrid approach to analysis was used including inductive coding directly from the data and deductive coding from a priori concepts developed from the literature [ 1 , 2 ], including relationship influences and beauty comparisons. Similar codes were color coded, categorized, and eventually merged into themes. For example, beauty descriptions of the young women were clustered into the beauty expectations theme. In this way, patterns were identified using codes and categories, and more abstract themes were developed based on inductive codes, existing literature, and theoretical underpinnings [ 25 ]. Then, they were reviewed again to assure that they were relevant to the study aims, and where appropriate, some subthemes were merged into larger themes. Lastly, the themes were labeled in a concise, clear manner.

The most salient, central theme that emerged related to the perceptions of Ankole adolescents and young women on body image was beauty expectations. It was by far the most prominent theme in participant responses. Relevant subthemes were discreet, yet interrelated and organized around the central theme of beauty expectations, including internal and external comparisons, relationship influences, and dietary habits (see Figure 1 ). The central theme and subthemes will be presented with data illustrations.

Relationship between beauty expectations and subthemes.

3.1. Beauty Expectations

Findings revealed that participants have preconceived perceptions of beauty, and these perceptions are shown to change over time because of the amount of exposure which is seen through societal influences that include media, peers, parents, and culture. Participants’ views and expectations are shown to change when they left rural areas for urban areas to work or study, while participants who remained in rural settings are shown to have been largely influenced by traditional Ankole culture. Both Bairu and Bahima participants described a beautiful woman as fat with wide hips and big buttocks and decently dressed. All participants from rural Ankole described a beautiful woman from Ankole as fat with a small waist and big buttocks. She should be dark-skinned, have short black hair, long arms with slender fingers, big legs, but also at the same time, a beautiful woman had to be decently dressed.

When asked to describe a beautiful woman in Ankole, participant 3 explains that:

She is fat! The Bahima love fat! That is why, the girl is given milk for her to become fat, get stretch marks, in the past, girls used to cut off their hair and dress up with beads to bring the allure of beauty and pride. (Participant 3 is a 19-year-old from rural Ankole)

However, 10 of the participants identified that beauty and ethics coincide together; one cannot be beautiful and yet behave badly; morals play an important role in beauty expectations. One young woman said:

Beauty is not only skin deep, but it is also aligned with proper manners and etiquette, big and beautiful women, take their time, are graceful in their walk and talk, and are not in a rush because they know what they are doing. (Participant 1 is a 24-year-old from rural Ankole)

While the two subgroups in Ankole had similar beauty expectations of a young woman, there are different traits. Participants who identified as Bairu described a beautiful woman in Ankole as one who is energetic with tough features that indicated that she worked well as a farmer. Participants who identified as Bahima explained that culturally, a beautiful woman is one with a soft and fat body, indicating that there should be no fieldwork.

Participant 8, a 20-year-old Mwiru from the Mwiru subgroup from Mitooma, a rural area in Ankole, explains that culturally, a beautiful girl is one that:

Among the Bairu, a beautiful girl that you can see must be tall. Maybe she is black or she is brown. She is energetic. By energy I mean, we usually engage in farming, so we know how to dig so we have tough hands.

Participant 3 is from Kiruhura, a rural area largely populated by the Bahima; she describes a beautiful woman as one:

A beautiful woman usually has a soft and fat body, with small baby-like fingers, usually, they will not engage in field work, they have delicate-like features, it shows that she’s well taken care of by her family.

Observations made at the Ankole museum in Mbarara supplemented participants’ perceptions of beauty expectations of a young woman in Ankole. These were shown in a historical portrait of a young woman in Ankole. These were physical traits derived from nature and the environment around. For example:

A beautiful woman in Ankole has eyes like stars, snow-white teeth, smooth and well-built arms, reed-like fingers, hair-like tree canopy, a neck of a water jar, breasts like a young fruit, a waistline of a wasp, hips of a churning gourd, legs like a banana stem and finally a baby’s foot. (A portrait of a beautiful woman in Ankole at the Mbarara Museum)

When asked if they met these beauty expectations, participants who did not fit these expectations considered themselves as not beautiful. Results show that 20 out of the 30 participants reported a lack of confidence toward their bodies brought on by the beauty expectations in Ankole. This was based on a couple of interview questions that queried their views on whether they met these standards (see Appendix A for interview questions). Participants from urban centers and contemporary Ankole reported having self-hate and low confidence because while in rural Ankole, a fat woman was beautiful, this was not the case in the cities. A young woman reported all her friends walk around with curvy bodies (in this case a small waist and large buttocks and hips). Her perception is that she is ugly because she cannot gain weight and have a body similar to those of her friends.

Interviewer: Do you think you fit in these beauty expectations in Ankole?

Participant 5 is a 21-year-old from rural Ankole:

Unfortunately, I don’t. I am a very slender girl with tiny hips and a very small bum. I have a boyish body that I hate so much. My friends and family have told me to drink a lot of milk and eat more food but until now I have not gained weight.

Most participants from towns and cities reported that beauty expectations of a young woman in Ankole meant that she had to be medium in size, have a slender nose, chocolate skinned, and long curly hair, while four of the participants described a beautiful woman as one with light skin with a slender body. All the 12 participants from the cities describe a fat woman as one that was unhealthy and lazy. Out of the 12 participants who lived in the city, seven had been born and raised in the city, while five had left the rural areas to find better jobs and education in the city.

Participant 7, a 20-year-old woman from urban Ankole, voiced her desire to be slender; she believes slenderness is synonymous to healthy. She said:

You see our parents think a very fat woman is a beautiful woman in Ankole. My parents insist that I look beautiful when I have gained weight; however, when I go back to the city my friends will make fun of me and call me a big mama so I have a hard time keeping a healthy weight. If I am not starving myself, I am overeating.

When asked about the perfect body in Ankole, the majority of participants identified a medium body as the perfect body. Participants who reported to not fit the ideal body were more likely between the ages of 20 and 22, and they described having no self-assurance toward their bodies, reporting dangerous eating habits such as using diet pills and/or overeating.

When asked if they believed they fit in the perfect Ankole ideal, participant 10, a 21-year-old from an urban area, believed that:

I don’t fit that perfect ideal body, I have always had a protruding tummy, and yet beautiful girls should have wasp waists and tiny tummies, I have tried starving myself, but a friend of my mine [said] to always drink lemon water, so I hope I see changes very soon.

However, results show that there were contradictory responses from young women and girls based on where they lived. Participants who described themselves as having the “right body” were more likely still living with their parents and had not been influenced by outside factors, such as the media. These participants perceived themselves as fat and dark-skinned, which is an ideal body sought after in rural Ankole despite their age. However, one should note that participants from urban centers who perceived their bodies as “just right” identified not too slender and not too fat but “medium” and chocolate skinned as the perfect body. This seemed to be based on influences such as the media and bodies of that of Beyoncé and Anita Fabiola (celebrities) and the fashion industry. Participant 12, a 20-year-old who lives and studies in the capital city, describes it as a place highly Westernized. She believed that everyone was aspiring toward what they see on TV and social media. She says:

I still believe that light skin is the beautiful and skinny just average weight but not very skinny, like a medium-size, small waist, and a relative bum not like mine (laughing) don’t go crazy. In terms of hair, I don’t have any preference because people look nice with short hair, long hair but I still believe in the whole light skin and the curvy body as beautiful.

In Uganda, people’s bodies are commonly described using figures to depict body figures. These figures ranged from one to nine. This is a continued and common practice for young and older people when describing one’s body. The figure one describes a slender body without curves that is usually masculine, while the figures six depicts a pear-shaped figure, while eight describes an hourglass figure, figure and figure nine refers to when one has a larger upper body than the lower body. So, when describing what is considered to be beautiful, participants had various yet similar descriptions of a beautiful woman in Ankole. In this case, when participants described their appearance, they associated their bodies with figures one to nine. Figures six and eight described the sought-after body while figures one and nine were used to describe an “ugly body”. Participants who did not identify with figures “six” and “eight” reported negative feelings toward their bodies. A “figure six” body was described by participants to mean that one has a slimmer upper body and a larger lower body with “big hips and buttocks”, while “figure eight” meant one’s body had bigger breasts a “wasp”-like waist and a large behind. Figures one and nine were described by participants as the least desirable bodies.

“Figures one and nine” are the ugliest, where one usually doesn’t have curves, hips, and a bum they’re sticks and built like boys, no man would want a woman who is built like a man or boy because then who will be the man in the relationship.

“Figures six and eight” are very feminine, my friends and mother tell me that when you have big hips, giving birth will be very easy so having big hips is very important, this is why I drink a lot of milk to ensure that my hips continue growing bigger.

Again, one should note that the results show contradictory statements from participants from rural and contemporary urban Ankole. Participants from rural Ankole identified a fat woman as the ideal body type based on images from their parents and cultural traditions, while participants from contemporary Ankole identified a slender and curvy woman as the ideal body type based on images in the media.

I think Nicki Minaj has a great body, she may be cosmetically enhanced but I think that’s what a perfect body looks like. (Participant 12)

3.2. Internal and External Comparisons

Results indicated that participants made comparisons of their bodies with what they see in the media, among friends and peers, in their homes and their community. Comparisons include the young woman’s own thoughts about how their body compares with others (internal beauty comparison), as well as those stemming from criticisms or comments from those in their social network (external beauty comparisons). These comparisons have been shown to influence their self-perceptions of beauty, in turn encouraging feelings of self-hate and lack of confidence.

When asked when body criticism began in their lives, most stated that they began to notice differences with their bodies and other girls and women when they turned 12 and 13 years old. This was usually pivotal when they began high school or started their first period. Results showed that their comparisons with friends and peers was notable to them in evaluation of their own beauty. Participants reminisced on their first time they developed a negative body image. However, it should be noted that body preferences differed with age. For example, for participants whose bodies began to change rapidly during puberty with enlarged hips and breasts, they developed a negative body image and were more likely engaged in risky relationships because such features meant that they had become women and were mature enough to engage in such behavior such as sex and drinking alcohol.

When asked when body criticism from peers and others in the community began, participant 12, born and raised in the city, reflected back when she was just 13 and how she felt about her body:

When I turned 13, my friends would point out that my hips were of a woman and that my breasts were big. Whenever I would walk back home, taxi men would tell me that my body was that of a grown woman and that I should just stay home and get married and have children. I hated walking back to school fearing that they would touch me and make more stupid comments.

Participants over the age of 16 in significant relationships who described their bodies as too thin and reported having negative feelings and self-hate toward their bodies resorting to overeating, because a small body meant that one was not feminine enough, and they were associated with children. Small breasts, small hips, and a small behind meant participants were not yet young women. One 21-year-old woman from the city described her time growing up, when all her friends started showing off their growing breasts, yet she had not grown an inch. She felt insecure when comparing herself with her friends:

When I turned 16, my breasts did not grow like the rest of my friends, I tried everything they told me for them to get bigger like I rubbed fruit on my breast every night hoping that they grow, my friends would make fun of me until they eventually came when I turned 18.

Similarly, the study showed that the perceptions of peers and others of their bodies affected the way the participants felt about their body image. Most participants reported that friends, intimate partners, and coworkers had their perceptions of a beautiful woman, and these perceptions oscillated from a fat dark-skinned woman to a slender light-skinned woman to a curvy, medium weight and chocolate-skinned woman. One young mother reported that her body has never looked the same since she gave birth. She hates that her waist has gotten bigger and when asked how her partner feels about her, she says that:

When I got married at 20, I had a very small waist and my husband made it a point reminding me that it’s one of the reasons he fell in love with me. But now I have added a few kilograms especially around my waist after having two children, I try everything from slimming pills to drinking lemon tea every day to get my waist back. It’s honestly frustrating and I hate going to parties with my friends because I don’t feel beautiful anymore.

All participants in the study endorsed comparing themselves to others, thus shaping their perceptions of a beautiful body in Ankole.

3.3. Relationship Influences

Contrary to the majority of participants being greatly influenced by their own perceptions of what a beautiful body should be, those who had positive relationships with parents and peers and relied largely on their religious beliefs did not perceive any body type as ideal but believed that a beautiful woman was one that was kind, decent, and God-fearing. These participants despite their age brackets described beauty as authentic. A few of the participants who identified as religious reported high self-assurance compared to those who did not consider themselves religious. One young woman considered herself as very religious, believing that the church can act as a solace for hope and love. She believes that her love for herself and her body regardless of how she looks is brought on by her faith in God. When asked how she feels about her body she says:

I am confident in my skin, God made us in his image, so everyone is beautiful; besides, we all can’t look the same. I always pray to God whenever I have feelings of self-doubt and hate.

Participants who listed positive relationships with their family, peers, and friends described their perceptions of beauty to be genuine and more authentic. Many participants reported having more positive relationships now that they are older. They also reported self-assurance and a positive outlook toward their bodies brought on by these relationships.

3.4. Dietary Habits

All participants reported adopting dietary habits based on the perceptions they have of their ideal body. However, it should be noted that dietary habits were consistent with expectations in the two contrasting societies in Ankole. Dietary habits of participants from rural Ankole encouraged weight gain and practices such as the all-dairy and carbohydrate diets. For example:

The Bahima girls only drink milk; fresh warm milk to be specific; they mix the yogurt with millet flour porridge, the milk will fatten the girl because the nourishment is of both carbohydrate and protein.

Dietary habits of participants from urban centers and towns in Ankole encouraged weight loss or overeating. Diets consisted of refined food, evasive diets such as juicing, plant-based diets, and no-carb diets. Participants who adopted such dietary habits were most likely between the ages of 20 and 24 years and were either working or at the university. The majority of the participants who adopted these diets reported low confidence and self-hate toward their bodies brought on by peer pressure from friends and colleagues. An example:

During the lunch break at my workplace, my boss has a habit of pointing out our imperfections, like one time she told a friend of mine that she needs to eat more vegetables because she has a big tummy, so currently she’s on a no-carb diet.

A few participants at workplaces and school described practices of skipping meals and taking part in complicated diets such as all-green diets and no-carb diets as they struggled to attain the desired body. This often led to anxiety, stress, and underperformance at school and work.

4. Discussion

This paper aimed to investigate adolescents and young women’s perceptions of a beautiful woman in Ankole and how these perceptions have appeared to affect their feelings toward their bodies. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development (1934) and feminist theory on body image development [ 27 ] address the existing socio-cultural influences on the female body in Ankole brought on by ever-changing globalization. This is manifested in the contradictory perceptions of beauty expressed in the voices of these young women in Ankole. There are clearly both psychological and physical risks and benefits of different types of influences on beauty expectations. The long-term goal of the study is to develop an intervention to promote body positivity and high self-esteem in young women in Uganda. In order to realize this goal, the results of the study will significantly inform the conceptualization, design, and implementation of future interventions.

The socio-cultural theory posits that existing social norms such as those related to peer perceptions, parents, and the media influence behavior and thought processes among young people through the messages that are conveyed [ 11 ]. Adolescents aspire to fit in, and this may encourage their need to seek approval through adopting behavior that is supported by social agents [ 10 , 11 ].

The socio-cultural theory largely explains how young people learn from the interactions they have with important social agents in their lives, but it fails to elucidate the feelings young people develop when they make comparisons with existing beauty ideals in society. This study adopted the self-discrepancy conceptualization by Higgins (1987) that explains that when individuals, in this case adolescents, make comparisons with a person, most likely using images presented in society and find an incongruity, consequences arise. According to the literature [ 3 , 28 ], adolescent girls will modify their eating behaviors to fit the ideal standard of beauty presented in that society [ 3 ]. College students reported having developed eating disorders brought on by the slender ideal presented in the media through magazines and social media [ 28 ]. The self-discrepancy theory highlights the feelings young people develop when they make comparisons with unattainable images presented and may lead to the dissatisfaction and satisfaction they have with their body images. The study adopted the feminist theory of the body that looks to existing structures in society that have long focused on the body image of women with cultures all over the world presenting the desired image [ 12 , 26 ]. These cultures have traditional practices in place that put women’s bodies at the center of intrigue. These practices include female genital mutilation in many African states, feet binding in China, and female fattening in the northern and east of Africa.

Adolescent girls and young women’s perceptions of beauty may differ depending on what type of society they live in [ 29 ]. Beautiful women in Ankole as described by the majority of young adult girls are fat—this is shown in their description of a beautiful woman, where they compare her body to objects in nature. This finding is supported by literature [ 16 , 21 ] that claims the African cultural preference of a beautiful woman is fat. Studies by [ 21 ] show that this perception has encouraged young women to adopt unhealthy eating habits such as overeating and carb-loaded diets to attain this ideal. This has led to an increase in obesity and cardiovascular diseases among young women and girls.

However, it should also be noted that there has been a shift in paradigm where fatness was and is in some parts of Ankole synonymous with beauty. Findings show that while the perception of a beautiful woman in Ankole is fatness, this is not experienced by some in urban places in Ankole society that are more Westernized. Some of the young adult Ankole girls from urban areas described a beautiful woman as one that was medium with average-size hips and a large behind, which can be described as curvy with Eurocentric features of beauty. This was common in older and highly educated participants who reported a low level of self-assurance and confidence toward their bodies based on their descriptions. According to studies [ 1 , 7 , 20 , 29 ], there is a shift from the traditional perceptions of feminine beauty to more contemporary aspects of feminine beauty.

While the literature on some African cultures of the female body such as those of west Africa and south Africa [ 16 , 20 , 30 ] show that fatness is synonymous to beauty, this study contradicts such literature showing that some of the young adult girls from urban areas of Ankole are driven by the effects of globalization and have beauty expectations that are similar to Westernized views, which are largely Eurocentric. Many young women and girls from urban areas of Ankole have adopted a Westernized view of beauty that is the thinner and curvier body. Most of the comments made by others focus the participant on “shedding” the extra weight by adopting unhealthy eating habits such as skipping meals or adopting a no-protein diet to meet the unrealistic expectations of the body ideal.

In this study, rural districts of Ankole show that adolescent and young adult girls of the ages of 16–24 make internal and external beauty comparisons. Young women in rural Ankole may adopt the dietary habits of the Ankole society to strive for the fat beauty notion. Results showed that because slenderness is associated with being weak and unhealthy, young women who made positive comparisons to others with larger bodies adopted dietary habits that encouraged weight gain. The studies [ 16 , 19 ] look to the Ankole culture and the emphasis on a dairy diet of milk that acts as a source for enlarging their physical features. This supports the claim in [ 21 ] that women in Uganda seek extra weight to appear more desirable and similar to the rest of women in their culture, encouraging poor eating habits that may place them at risk for health problems such as obesity and cardiovascular diseases.

The findings also reflect how relationships in society influence beauty perceptions of young women and girls. According to [ 27 , 29 ], body dissatisfaction is greater for women in socially valued roles such as employment and romantic relationships. The finding resonates with a study on peer and parental relationships where the author found that parent and peer comments on appearance encouraged unhealthy body image [ 2 ]. Young people may dwell on such comments and in turn may flounder in their work [ 15 ]. These findings verify those of [ 2 ], indicating that young women and may internalize unrealistic beauty perceptions from significant others and employers, placing young adult girls at risk of developing unrealistic perceptions of their bodies based on the poor judgements toward their bodies brought on by those close to them.

Similar to [ 2 , 9 , 31 , 32 ], this study suggests that socio-cultural influences affect the way perceptions of body image and beauty develop. While most socio-cultural influences such as parents, peers, religion, and the media reported in the study tend to create a negative body image based on unrealistic perceptions of beauty, the young women in the study reported that these socio-cultural influences also encouraged their positive perceptions of their bodies. The authors of [ 33 ] explain that when surrounded by people who constantly focus on what is inside one’s mind and not the outside, a person’s perception of beauty tends to focus more on the mind. This finding suggests that positive relationships with affirmations may encourage positive perceptions of the body.

Limitations

The sample was limited to 30 participants in particular districts in Ankole to provide their experiences with the existing social expectations of the female body. Therefore, the findings are limited in their representativeness of young women in these areas. The participants included were purposively selected; thus, they are not representative of the larger population of all adolescent girls and young women in Ankole. Girls of 18 and below tended to be less expressive than young women older than 18, so many of the narrative illustrations were for participants above 18 years old. Therefore, the findings may not represent all experiences of adolescent girls and young women. Future research on a larger population across the different regions within Uganda is encouraged, given that Uganda is a multi-culture state with differing beauty ideals.

5. Conclusions

This study has shown that adolescent girls and young women’s perceptions of beauty largely stem from socio-cultural influences; the study shows that young people will seek to attain unrealistic body shapes and sizes largely because the societies in which they live have created these images. Perceptions of these unrealistic images are shown to be shaped by socialization to outside influences such as the media. It can be argued that perceptions born out of such influences encourage unrealistic goals of body appearance, in turn affecting young people’s self-esteem. Findings suggest the need for a reframing of the emphasis on other positive developmental assets of young women rather than on their physical appearance. Government campaigns with supportive curricula and media messages that focus on building the self-esteem of young people could positively contribute to fostering generations of young women who are full of self-confidence and national pride.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the Mbarara University of science and technology and the Participants from the Ankole region. The author wishes to thank Alex Kukundakwe, Noreen Atwijukire and Arinatwe Rita for data management.

Interview questions (Narrative interviews) for young women and girls.

• How would you describe a beautiful woman in the Ankole culture? (Introduce the topic)
• In your own opinion with body image, how do you fit within the Ankole culture beauty standards? (Probes for positives and negatives)
• As a young person growing up in in this society, have you and other young women of Ankole compared yourselves to young women and girls in media (social media that is Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, and the local media) and the media?
• In your own experience, how do young women and girls talk about their bodies when in each other’s company? (Probe: How often?)
• As young woman growing up, have you had positive/negative attitudes about dark skin and light skin?
• Why do you think women and girls are much more likely to engage in body appearance than men and boys? (Probe: Why women and girls and not men and boys? Why men and boys and not women and girls?)
• As a young man or boy, how would you describe a typical female body you desire and dislike? (Probe for appreciation and shaming conversations over female body image: What reactions do you have to those kinds of conversations? Do you ever have conversations like this?)
• Have you ever been in a relationship? (Probe for (1) positive appreciation of her body by the fiancée. (2) Positive appreciation for self-perception of her body due to the comment made by the fiancée/partner/fiancée. (3) Shaming comments of her body made by her fiancée/partner/boyfriend. (4) Her self-perception of her body from the shaming comments made by her fiancée/partner/boyfriend.)

Facilitators and Barriers to Body Image Among Adolescents Girls and Young Women

• What was happening with your body during this time?
• What messages did you receive about your body and appearance?
• What did people say about your body?
• What kinds of non-verbal messages did you receive?
• When do you focus on the physical aspects that you think need to be changed?
• When do you feel comfortable with what you see? What traits do you like?
• How do others respond to your appearance now? Does this have an effect on your feelings of body criticism or acceptance?
• What circumstances, emotions, thoughts, or other factors might impact whether you feel positively or poorly about your body in your current daily life?
• To what extent does “body criticism” limit, constrain, hurt, or otherwise feel oppressive to you?
• Does it cause harmful body practices such as over or under-eating, over or under-exercising, etc.?
• How much time do you spend thinking about your body and appearance in interactions with others? How do you think body criticism affects your interactions with others?
• How often do you engage in conversations about body image, and how do you think they affect you?
• As a young person growing, how did your attitude about skin tone develop throughout your life, particularly your childhood?
• Is there a body shaming issue at school, in your homes, from the community and intimate relationships? (Probe: If you feel there is body shaming, what should be done about it?)
• In your own experience, because of the media, is there a specific definition of a ‘perfect body’ that young women and girls want to achieve? (Probe: What struggles do you go through to achieve this body?)
• In your own experience, does the Ankole traditional society create an unattainable body image for young women, and how do you feel about the way the media portrays women and men?
• In your own experience, what do we do about the ways we view our bodies a norm that has been ingrained into our psyche for many years?

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, R.K.; methodology, R.K.; validation, R.K., C.M. and D.A.; formal analysis, R.K.; investigation, R.K.; resources, R.K.; data curation, R.K.; writing—original draft preparation, R.K.; writing—review and editing, S.K.; supervision, C.M., S.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study has been approved for a period of one year from 25 November 2019 to 24 November 2020 and the approval number is SS466ES. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Mbarara University of Science and Technology and the Uganda National Council for Science & Technology. After recruitment.

Informed Consent Statement

Consent forms were distributed to young adults above the age of 18. They were given detailed information on the study and the minimal risks it might bring up, such as the topic of discussion may bring out memories or experiences that might trigger uncomfortable memories. It is also possible that you might get tired during the interview or find some of the questions hard or uncomfortable to answer. Assent forms were distributed to young people below the age of 18 with a parent and guardian present. The researcher described the research in detail, explaining the purpose and importance of the study. Then, consent forms were presented to the parents asking if they would allow their child to take part in the study, including interviews without the parent present to facilitate the discussion of personal perceptions. Participants were reminded that participation was voluntary and that all data were confidential and protected by assigning a unique identification number to the interview transcripts instead of their names. Assent forms were signed by the younger girls following parental consent.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

What is the thesis of Science and beauty by Isaac Asimov?

The thesis is that Ignorance conceals the true beauty and wonder of all things.

For example: Thinking that stars are just bright beautiful dots in the sky is like thinking to yourself that a McDonald's Burger is made at McDonald's.

Yes, a McDonald's Burger is made at McDonald's, but do they own cows and make the meat there? Do they grow their own potatoes and instantly slice them and put 'em in the deep fryer? No! They get their meat from frozen packages, which came from distant farms. Same with the potatoes.

The same can be applied to the Stars in the Night Sky, they aren't just shiny bright dots that people gaze at with Awe, they are HUGE hot flaming balls of gas that are almost infinitely far away from us.

Understanding the things that amazes us, will amaze us even more! So don't be ignorant, or you don't get WOW'd!

Add your answer:

Why was Isaac Asimov a futurist?

Isaac Asimov was very comfortable with science and technology. He was interviewed in 1964 to make predictions about the future. He was very close in his predictions of 2014.

Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 what was he famous for?

Isaac Asimov wrote the 4 laws of robotics (law 0 added later).He also wrote or edited over 500 books, mostly Science Fiction.

What genre is Isaac Asimov?

Asimov didn't write just in one genre, but his fiction was largely Science Fiction.

What is the birth name of Isaac Asimov?

Isaac Asimov's birth name is Isaak Judah Ozimov.

Is 'The Fun They Had' by Isaac Asimov considered a short story?

Yes, 'The Fun They Had' by Isaac Asimov is a short story.

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Carly's Responses

"science and beauty" by isaac asimov.

3. a) There are a couple of rhetorical questions used throughout this essay. The first is in the first paragraph "Why bother learning all that junk when I can just go out and look at the stars?" and a second is in the fifth paragraph, "Should I be satisfied to watch the sun glinting off a single pebble and scorn any knowledge of a beach?" These rhetorical questions offer the reader a chance to reflect on what the author's statement or opinion is trying to convey. Since they are so obvious, the reader unconsciously will respond as Asimov most likely wants, and they will therefore agree with him.

b) The use of imagery is used quite effectively throughout this essay, especially when the author is providing examples of beauty not seen. An example would be "we are becoming more aware of the violence at the centres- of great explosions and outpourings of radiation, marking the death of perhaps millions of stars." The author may just be describing the atmospheric conditions of the stars but he creates such an image with such great detail, one of which would normally just be disregarded and moved past. The use of imagery adds "visual interest" to the story, almost as if the author is "drawing" a picture for the reader so that what the author is writing is more comprehensible .

c) The author introduces a metaphor "-to form an enormous pinwheel. This pinwheel, the Milky Way galaxy" to make a comparison between to unseemly similar subjects. It offers the reader a link to what is being discussed so that they can make relations and connections to what is being presented.

d) The author uses personification effectively when he writes, "There are stars that pulsate endlessly in a great cosmic breathing". He gives the stars and galaxies personal characteristics to add interest, appeal and a sense of familiarity so that the examples being provided are more relatable to the reader.

4. In paragraphs 7 and 8, Asimov creates coherence in his writing through the use of similar introductory sentences. In the first paragraph he begins "Those bright spots in the sky that we call planets are worlds" and in the following paragraph starts with "Those other bright spots, which are stars rather than planets, are actually suns". The second introductory sentence is a direct reference to the preceding paragraph and creates a link between the two. Furthermore, the use of the phrase "bright spots" in both paragraphs makes a coherent connection to the planets and stars that the author uses as examples to prove his thesis.

5 comments:

nice one, you save my ass out with my assignment. your summary is plain and clear with enough detail as I expected.

Merci beaucoup...

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• Published: 06 June 2024

Finding great beauty in cosmetic chemistry

• Kelly A. Dobos   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0003-5373-3347 1  

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Cosmetic science has driven innovations that have substantially improved the quality of life for people around the world. While the field is often first associated with makeup products, research and advances in cosmetic science have had a broader impact on human health, societal progress, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

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International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue V, May 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction among Beauty Salons

Rey Avila Mangarin 1 , Jennifer C. Gonzaga 2 1 The University of Mindanao (Panabo) 2 Dean of Business Education, Samal Island City College

Abstract: This study was conducted to determine the significant influence of service quality on customer satisfaction among beauty salons in a certain municipality of Davao del Norte, Philippines. A quantitative non-experimental descriptive-correlational design was employed in the study utilizing a convenient sampling technique among respondents distributed from six beauty salons each with a quota of 50 customers to rate for year 2019. Mean was used to measure the level of service quality and customer satisfaction while linear regression analysis was used in determining what domain of service quality significantly influence customer satisfaction among beauty salons. As a result, service quality was in high level which while customer satisfaction was in moderate level. It was also found out that there is a low positive significant relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction among beauty salons and that 9.06% of the customer satisfaction can be attributed to service quality. Further, only tangibles domain significantly influences customer satisfaction while the rest did not. Thus, service quality is recommended to be enhanced to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction.

Keywords: beauty salons, customer satisfaction, service quality

I.INTRODUCTION

Every morning, most people have different rituals of beautifying personally. It involves the daily shower and shave, the weekly nail trim and the monthly haircut. Beauty salon is an establishment that can provide and offer services for both men and women in enhancing their physical image. It offers various services like haircut, hair treatment, foot care and spa, manicure, pedicure etc. However, not all beauty salon can easily gain customers and increase profit due to the lack of information that should from their target individuals (Sena, 2014). Thousands of beauty care service providers have arrived all over the country in the last decade. The beauty salon industry started to enter the business world hence, customer satisfaction is affected. In order to comprehend the booming industry, understanding the perceptions of the consumers is essential to maintain its quality of giving service (Akter, 2008).

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25 gorgeous nebula photos that capture the beauty of the universe

Nebulas — colorful clouds of expanding gas and dust — have long captivated stargazers with their beauty. Here are 25 of the most stunning nebulas in the universe.

Nebulas, which are both hubs of star birth and products of stars' demise, explode and transform with light and color as the stellar life cycle unfolds within them. These giant clouds of dust and gas that fill the space between stars have long captivated onlookers with their ethereal beauty. Here's a look at 25 of the most breathtaking nebulas in the universe.

1. Carina Nebula

The Carina Nebula is one of the largest star-birth regions NASA can see. It's home to 12 or more stars that are 50 to 100 times the mass of the sun, including the unstable supergiant Eta Carinae , one of the brightest known stars.

2. Ring Nebula

Known for its simple, graceful shape, the Ring Nebula is 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra and stretches 1 light-year across. Its color fades with temperature; hot blue gas at the center fades to cooler green and yellow around the edges. It's a popular object of study for amateur astronomers.

3. Twin Jet Nebula

The Twin Jet Nebula is a binary planetary nebula. Rather than holding a single star at its center, this nebula has two stars orbiting in a binary system, giving the nebula its iridescent wings. It's also known as Minkowski's butterfly, after Hermann Minkowski, the scientist who discovered it.

4. Helix Nebula

The Helix Nebula, located in the constellation Aquarius, is another favorite of amateur astronomers because of its bright colors. The nebula's strong resemblance to an eyeball has given it the nickname "God's Eye."

5. Horsehead Nebula

The Horsehead Nebula, located in the constellation Orion, is one of the most recognized and photographed nebulas in the sky, according to NASA . Like a majestic cosmic cloud, the nebula appears transparent here because the photo was taken with infrared imaging. In visual wavelengths, the nebula is dark and red.

6. Cat's Eye Nebula

The Cat's Eye Nebula is made up of 11 rings of gas, giving it one of the most complex structures of any known nebula. It was one of the first planetary nebulas ever discovered.

7. Omega Nebula

The Omega Nebula is also known as the Swan Nebula. It is a hotbed of newly born stars, according to NASA , and exists in the constellation Sagittarius, 5,500 light-years away.

8. Rosette Nebula

The Rosette Nebula is a stellar nursery — a region of concentrated star formation. It is located 5,000 light-years away, in the constellation Monoceros (the unicorn).

9. Eagle Nebula

The Eagle Nebula was discovered in 1745. Its fingerlike extensions are known as the Pillars of Creation , but they make up only a small region of the roughly 70-light-year-wide nebula.

10. Ghost Head Nebula

The Ghost Head Nebula is another star formation hub. Its red-and-green glow comes from light emitted by hydrogen and oxygen.

11. Lagoon Nebula

Intense radiation sculpted dust and gas into the robust Lagoon Nebula. The source of the radiation? Stars forming deep in the nebula's center. The Lagoon is an enormous star-birthing region, extending 100 light-years.

12. Soul Nebula

Located 6,500 light-years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia, is the Soul Nebula. The nebula's internal cavity and pillar-like columns are reminiscent of the landscape in the Badlands of South Dakota, NASA says .

13. Running Chicken Nebula

The Running Chicken Nebula is located in our own galaxy, the Milky Way . It got its name because — you guessed it — it looks a bit like a chicken darting across the sky.

14. Spider Nebula

Also a resident of the Milky Way, the Spider Nebula is a hub of star formation with green tendrils.

15. Trifid Nebula

Discovered in 1764, this nebula is 7,000 light-years away and a hub of star formation. It even has dark cores known as stellar incubators, where star formation is especially prolific.

16. Tarantula Nebula

The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is the largest and brightest region of star formation in the Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way, Andromeda and 20 other smaller galaxies. It's often a focus of astronomers who are trying to understand star formation.

17. Cygnus Loop Nebula

The Cygnus Loop Nebula, located 1,500 light-years away, is a supernova remnant — the remains of a stellar explosion between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago.

18. Ant Nebula

The Ant Nebula earned its name because it resembles the head and thorax of a garden variety ant. A dying sunlike star in the "thorax" of the nebula has shed light on the potential fate of the sun.

19. NGC 6153

What's interesting about NGC 6153 is its gases. It contains up to three times more neon, argon, oxygen and carbon than the solar system does, and it holds five times more nitrogen than the sun.

20. Hourglass Nebula

The Hourglass Nebula is another remnant of a dying star. As part of its slow death, the star has begun to shed its outer layers of gas in two directions.

21. Skull and Crossbones Nebula

Located about 4,400 light-years from Earth, the Skull and Crossbones Nebula is a hotbed of star formation that looks eerily like a sinister, spying face.

22. Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery that, at 1,500 light-years away, is the closest star-forming region to Earth. Because of its proximity to Earth and location next to Orion's Belt, this nebula can be spotted with the naked eye. The best time to look for it is January.

23. Dumbbell Nebula

The Dumbbell Nebula was the first planetary nebula ever discovered. It contains several clumps, or extremely dense knots of dust and gas. Each one is more than three times Earth's mass.

24. Peony Nebula

This nebula, which resembles scattered pink blooms across the night sky, is home to the second-brightest known star, which shines with the intensity of 3.2 million suns and is second only to Eta Carinae.

25. Lion Nebula

The Lion Nebula, also known as the Clown Face Nebula, appears as an iridescent face made of overlapping ellipticals encircled by a flaming orange mane. According to NASA , the outer ring is made of comet-shaped materials whose tails are streaming away from the central dying star.

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Donavyn Coffey is a Kentucky-based health and environment journalist reporting on healthcare, food systems and anything you can CRISPR. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired UK, Popular Science and Youth Today, among others. Donavyn was a Fulbright Fellow to Denmark where she studied  molecular nutrition and food policy.  She holds a bachelor's degree in biotechnology from the University of Kentucky and master's degrees in food technology from Aarhus University and journalism from New York University.

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