Sublime – beauty or terror? To understand the sublime, think of the last time you looked at something so overwhelming that it made your chest…
The world has lost it’s lustre… Without grandeur it has lost beauty and awe… At its core, grandeur is the quality of melting away the…
The Gravity of Beauty: On the Burden of Making Something Everyone Wants There is a peculiar law that governs the realm of human creation, one…
Use and Uselessness Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic…
Hedonist Conceptions Thinkers of the 18th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for…
Love and Longing Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they…
The Idealist Conception There are many ways to interpret Plato’s relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in the Republic characterizes justice in terms…
The Classical Conception The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and…
Golden Ratio of Beauty The Pythagorean mathematician described beauty relatively as 1.6180339887 and named it a golden ratio they kept seeing in things regarded as…
Beauty is in the power of the holder… Beauty is a subjective and culturally influenced idea, meaning that what is considered beautiful to one person…
Shibui (渋い) – Beauty Shibui (渋い, adjective), shibusa (渋さ, noun), or shibumi (渋み, noun), all derived from the character 渋 (shibu) is one of the…