Beauty in the Twentieth Century

Beauty in the Twentieth Century

The word beauty has various meanings depending on who you ask. For some it means attractive features for other’s beauty is just a facial feature. For most, beauty is the inner quality of a person that makes us happy to be around and that is a very important component of human psychology. We all want to be loved and to have a good social life. It is through beauty in our interactions with others that we come to understand ourselves and what sort of person we are.

Beauty is frequently defined as a physical trait that creates a certain mental state – a mood – and makes things visually appealing. These things include sunsets, beautiful landscapes, humans and other artistic works. Beauty, along with personality, is perhaps the most interesting part of aesthetics, at least one of the main branches of psychology. It tries to explain why people of different cultures and historical periods feel so attracted to certain aesthetic values, including beauty. It attempts to answer why beauty is more appreciated by some than others and why the beauty standards vary between societies.

For a nineteenth century British philosopher defined beauty as something entirely individual. He believed that beauty consisted in the ability to please the eye, and that there was no standard of beauty beyond the power of the beholder to appreciate beauty in form. A Victorian aestheologist argued that beauty consisted in the pleasing to the eye, and that the definition of beauty depended largely on the power of the imagination rather than on the individual’s ability to please the eye. Another twentieth century aesthetician defined beauty as subjective, an internal state, existing independent of any standards recognized by the social order. According to this view, beauty is something that one experiences rather than a measurable attribute.