Blog 2 - initial

I think that beauty is a concept similar to the idea of art that Benedetto Croce wrote about in his essay “Aesthetics.” Beauty is an a priori concept that real objects refer to. I believe that beauty is therefore not a real property of objects.

Part of Croce’s argument is that what the time period defines as ‘art’ plays an important role in what ‘art’ means. The same is true for beauty. There is a normative understanding of what is beautiful. I think that this can most easily be seen in advertisements and ‘beauty contests.’ On the other hand, some people reject this normative concept of beauty and have a different understanding of what makes something beautiful. For some this is an intentional rejection and for others I think it is more natural or learned. In both cases, deciding what is beautiful is from my understanding a learned process. That may mean that you learn to associate beauty with the beauty put forth by ‘beauty pageants’ and advertisements or you decide early on that the normative form of beauty is just a social construction. Either way you are leaning on the a priori concept of beauty that necessitates beauty as a category to organize things in our lives.

In my opinion, beauty is not a real property of objects but rather a way of looking at something. Objects refer to this a priori concept of beauty because we have this human need for finding things pleasant and beautiful. It is one of the lenses that we use to order the world. Like I mentioned above, we learn from a very early age what to define as beautiful and only with time can you rearrange your a posteriori idea of beauty.