Beauty in The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy


 
Studia Gilsoniana 7, no. 4 (October–December 2018): 579–595 

ISSN 2300–0066 (print) 

ISSN 2577–0314 (online) 

DOI: 10.26385/SG.070430 
 

ARTICLE — Received: May 27, 2018 ▪ Accepted: Nov. 07, 2018                           

PIOTR JAROSZYŃSKI
*
 

 
BEAUTY  

IN THE UNIVERSAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF  

PHILOSOPHY * 

 
Beauty (Greek: καλός, Latin: pulchritudo, pulchrum) is an ana-

logically understood property of reality, of human products (including 

art), and of the human mode of conduct, and expressed in the tradition 

of Western culture under the form of harmony, perfection, or splendor, 

which as beheld and for beholding arouses complacency or pleasure. 

At present, beauty is most often associated with art, with sensory 

knowledge, and with emotions. The reflections of the ancient Greeks on 

beauty did not put works of art in the first place, but instead put reality 

(the cosmos) and morality (καλοκάγαθία) there. The first theories of 

beauty were not univocal but were intended to consider the analogical 

dimension of beauty, and even the transcendental dimension of beauty. 

Classical Theories of Beauty 

The first theory of beauty was developed by the Pythagoreans. 

They regarded number as the main principle of being. Number was mani-

                                                
*PIOTR JAROSZYŃSKI — John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland 

e-mail: jarosz@kul.lublin.pl ▪ ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6857-3943 

* This article is a part of The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be published by 
the Polish Society of Thomas Aquinas. It is a revised and translated version of the en-
cyclopedia entry originally published in Polish as: Piotr Jaroszyński, “Piękno,” in 
Powszechna encyklopedia filozofii, vol. 8, ed. Andrzej Maryniarczyk (Lublin: PTTA, 
2007). 



Piotr Jaroszyński 580 

fested under the form of harmony that permeated the world on the mac-

roscopic and microscopic level. Music was the chief manifestation of 

harmony. The Pythagorean Theon of Smyrna wrote:  

[M]usic is the warp thread of agreement between things in nature 

and the universe of the best administration. Harmony as a rule 
takes the form of harmony in the universe, legitimacy in the 

state, and a prudent way of life in the home. This is because har-

mony joins and unites. They say that action and the application 

of knowledge [musical knowledge] are manifested in four human 
domains: in the soul, in the body, in the home, and in the state. 

This is because those four things require harmonization and uni-

fication.
1
  

Beauty as music and harmony refers to the universe, to nature, to the 

state, to domestic life, and to man in his bodily and spiritual aspect. 

The second theory holds that beauty is form. It was formulated 

by Plato who thought that an immaterial world to which ideas belonged 

existed above the material world. Among the ideas there is the idea of 

beauty whereby, by participation (the theory of participation), material 

beings are also beautiful—“[T]hat I asked about beauty itself, that 

which gives the property of being beautiful to everything, to which it is 

added—to stone and wood, and man, and god, and every action and 

every branch of learning?”
2
 Man should strive after beauty as thus un-

derstood as the purpose of his life—“[A] man finds it truly worth while 

to live, as he contemplates essential beauty.”
3
 

A somewhat different conception of beauty is found in the Ti-

maeus: there beauty is not determined by participation in the idea of 

                                                
1 Mathematica, I, cit. after Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Historia estetyki [History of 
Aesthetics], vol. 1 (Wrocław 1960), 105. 
2 Greater Hippias, 292 D, in Plato, Dialogues, vol. 1, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1953), 579. 
3 Symposium, 211 D, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9, trans. Harold N. Fowler 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925). 
Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections. 



Beauty 

 

581 

 

beauty, but by the degree to which things produced by the Demiurge 

are in agreement with their immaterial primordial models—“But when 

the artificer of any object, in forming its shape and quality, keeps his 

gaze fixed on that which is uniform, using a model of this kind, that 

object, executed in this way, must of necessity be beautiful.”
4
 

Plotinus criticized the theory of harmony. He remarked that since 

harmony is unity in plurality, then beauty could not be something sim-

ple, e.g., light or color. Meanwhile, it is that which is simple (a model, 

idea, or form) that is beautiful, and what is composite is beautiful by 

participation in an idea.  

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 visi-

ble 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 de-

void of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out 

of the realm of beauty.
5
 

Plotinus was inclined to accept light-form as the source of beau-

ty, both in a material sense and in a spiritual sense. His conception 

found continuators in the Middle Ages. Pseudo-Dionysius gave it a 

more metaphysical form and remarked that supra-entitative beauty is 

the source of beauty. 

                                                
4 Timaeus, 28 A–B, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925). 
Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections. 
5 The Enneads, I, 6, 1, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 46. 



Piotr Jaroszyński 582 

But, the superessential Beautiful is called Beauty, on account of 

the beauty communicated from Itself to all beautiful things, in a 

manner appropriate to each, and as Cause of the good harmony 

and brightness of all things which flashes like light to all the 

beautifying distributions of its fontal ray . . .
6
 

Robbert Grosseteste and Witelo, under the influence of new dis-

coveries in optics, thought that light was also the cause of beauty, and 

that light was what allowed us to see beauty—“Lux est maxime pul-

chrificativa et pulchritudinis manifestiva.”
7
 Ulrich of Strasburg said that 

there were two kinds of light, physical light and immaterial light, which 

respectively are the reason for material beauty and spiritual beauty—

“[S]icut lux corporalis est formaliter et causaliter pulchritudo omnium 

visibilium, sic lux intellectualis est formalis causa pulchritudinis omnis 

formae substantialis etiam materialis formae.”
8
 

In the Aristotelian schools, beauty was associated with form. 

Form was understood either as an internal principle of being or only as 

an accidental form that organizes matter or human action. Albert the 

Great held such a position—“Pulchrum [dicit] splendorem formae sub-

stantialis vel actualis supra partes materiae proportionatas. . . . Ratio 

pulchri in universali consistit in resplendentia formae super partes ma-

teriae proportionatas, vel super diversas vires vel actiones.”
9
 

Thomas Aquinas also thought that form was the reason for beau-

ty—“[B]eauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.”
10

 He 

                                                
6 De divinis nominibus, IV, 7, in The Collected Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 

trans. John Parker (Woodstock, Ontario: Solace Games, 2015), 20. 
7 Robert Grosseteste, Commentarii in De divinis nominibus, IV. Cf. also, Witelo, 
Optica, IV, 148. 
8 Liber de summo bono, II, 3, 5. 
9 Opusculum de pulchro et bono, V, 420–421. 
10 S.Th., I, q. 5, art. 4, ad 1: “[P]ulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis.” 
Retrieved from: St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the 
English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros. edition, 1947). Available at:  

https://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/. 



Beauty 

 

583 

 

combined previous elements of reflections on beauty and presented a 

definition of beauty (called the objective definition) in which he em-

phasized three elements: perfection, proportion, and brilliance—“For 

beauty includes three conditions, integrity or perfection, since those 

things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due proportion or 

harmony; and lastly, brightness or clarity, whence things are called 

beautiful which have a bright color.”
11

 

While the two theories of beauty above had objective value, the 

third, which had appeared among the Stoics, considered the role of the 

subject without falling into subjectivism. Basil the Great was the author 

of the theory. Basil thought that beauty was the proper relation (or 

proportion) between an object that is beheld and the subject who sees it; 

that relation makes the joy of beholding appear in the subject—“Would 

not the symmetry in light be less shown in its parts than in the pleasure 

and delight at the sight of it? Such is also the beauty of gold, which it 

owes not to the happy mingling of its parts, but only to its beautiful 

color which has a charm attractive to the eyes.”
12

 Thomas Aquinas pre-

sented this idea saying: “beautiful things are those which please when 

seen” and of which “the beautiful is something pleasant to appre-

hend.”
13

 

                                                
11 S.Th., I, q. 39, art. 8, resp.: “Nam ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Primo quidem, 
integritas sive perfectio, quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita pr o-
portio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas: unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra 
esse dicuntur.” 
12 Homilia in Hexaëmeron, II, 7, trans. Blomfield Jackson, in From Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: 
Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895). Available at:  

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32012.htm. 
13 S.Th., I, q. 5, art. 4, ad 1: “[P]ulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent;” and ibid., I–II, 
q. 27, art. 1, ad 3: “[P]ulchrum autem dicatur id cuius ipsa apprehensio placet.” 



Piotr Jaroszyński 584 

Beauty in the Metaphysical Conception 

Metaphysics as it was classically understood investigates being 

as being and the properties of being that are called the transcendentals. 

The transcendentals, aside from being, are as follows: thing, one, sepa-

rateness, truth, and good. The status of beauty has been a matter of dis-

cussion. Some authors think that beauty cannot be considered one of 

the transcendentals because it does not refer to every being, since some 

things are ugly (Marc de Munnynck, Marie-Dominique Philippe), or 

not all are harmonious (Maurice de Wulf), or because beauty does not 

refer to every element of being but only to form (Philippe), or because 

it is only a species of the good (Joseph Kleutgen, Joseph Gredt), or a 

synthesis of the recognized transcendentals, especially truth and the 

good (Antoni B. Stępień). Most authors, however, hold that beauty is a 

separate transcendental property of being, although it is a synthesis of 

truth and the good (Alejandro Lobato, Matteo Liberatore, Antonin D. 

Sertillange, Étienne Gilson, Mieczysław A. Krąpiec), or of being, truth, 

and the good (Gerald B. Phelan), or even a synthesis of all the tran-

scendentals (Jacques Maritain). Beauty is most often mentioned at the 

end, but it has been mentioned at the beginning when someone consid-

ers not philosophical reflection on the transcendentals but considers the 

character of man’s personal life, which is integrally activated both in 

the cognitive sphere and in the emotional-volitional sphere (Krąpiec). 

Beauty as a transcendental property of being is one of the rela-

tional transcendentals that show the relation of being to the subject—in 

a constitutive sense to the Absolute, and secondarily to man. Although 

formally beauty is a synthesis of truth and the good, from the metaphys-

ical point of view, it expresses an integral relation of being to the per-

son, and not only to the intellect (the truth), or only to the will (the 

good). 



Beauty 

 

585 

 

Beauty in Aesthetics 

In ancient and medieval theories of beauty, the transcendental 

and the categorical conceptions of beauty were not presented as being 

opposed, all the more since aesthetics as a separate science did not ap-

pear until the mid-eighteenth century. Aesthetic theories of beauty are 

burdened by the same philosophical assumptions from which aesthetics 

arose. Those assumptions concern the theory of being, nature, and man. 

Aesthetics arose in the Cartesian-Leibnizian current because of Alex-

ander Baumgarten (1750), a student of Christian Wolff. Beauty was 

connected with art and defined as the perfection of sensory knowledge. 

The beauty of reality (i.e., the beauty of being and the beauty of nature) 

was abandoned, as did moral beauty, which was so typical of the 

Greeks. The expression “fine arts” was introduced by Charles Batteux 

(1748). In aesthetics, beauty was initially regarded as the chief concept, 

but by the end of the nineteenth century, beauty lost its position to aes-

thetic categories (Karl Groos, Victor Basch) and then to (1) aesthetic 

values, such as sublimity, appropriateness, or charm and grace, which 

were already known to ancient writers, or (2) new categories, such as 

the small, the immature, and even the ugly and the atrocious (Roman 

Ingarden). 

Because of the shaky status and conception of beauty in aesthet-

ics, there were even proposals (especially in analytic philosophy) to 

remove beauty from aesthetics (Jerome Stolnitz, Herbert Read, and 

John Passmore). A further step was anti-aesthetics and anti-kallism 

where negative aesthetic values including ugliness took the superior 

position.
14

 The crisis of beauty in aesthetics is affected by the context of 

the crisis in philosophy and Western culture. Aesthetics is not an au-

tonomous domain of philosophy because it is cultivated within certain 

                                                
14 Henryk Kiereś, Człowiek i sztuka [Man and Art] (Lublin: PTTA, 2006), 41–58. 



Piotr Jaroszyński 586 

movements of philosophy whose aims, object, and methods can either 

open or close aesthetics to reality and the legacy of culture. Anti-

kallism falls into the context of late ancient oriental movements, such 

as Manicheanism and Gnosticism, that penetrated into Western culture 

and promoted the negation of both matter and the cosmos under the 

form of evil and ugliness. 

The Separation of Beauty from Reality 

The process of the separation of beauty from reality appeared in 

the context of the conception of being, nature, and human knowledge. 

If a philosophical position says that being is unknowable, by the same 

token no properties, and all the more beauty, can be predicated of be-

ing. Modern and contemporary theories of beauty were strongly influ-

enced by Cartesian agnosticism in which ideas, and not reality trans-

cendent to ideas, were regarded as the direct object of human con-

sciousness. Descartes was influenced by Francisco Suárez and identi-

fied ideas with “subjective concepts” (conceptus subiectivus); the sub-

jective concept no longer performed a transparent cognitive function (as 

a medium quo). As a result, man’s entire personal (cognitive, volitional, 

and emotional) life was locked within human awareness. The real world 

ceased to be the object of philosophy, and beauty could appear only as 

one of the immanent correlates of our acts; as a result, the subjectiviza-

tion of the understanding of beauty had to follow. 

The conception of being either opens or closes the way to beauty. 

If being is understood in an analogical and transcendental way, beauty 

can be a property of being. On the other hand, if the concept of being 

arises by way of abstraction, then being is either something completely 

undetermined in itself, a pure possibility, and non-contradiction (John 

Duns Scotus), or it is identified with nothingness and as such is regard-



Beauty 

 

587 

 

ed as internally contradictory (Georg W. F. Hegel). In the second ap-

proach, there is no room for the beauty of being. 

The connection of beauty with nature depends on the conception 

of nature. If nature is a purely systemic concept entirely dependent on 

the structure of a philosophical system and independent of reality, then 

the position of beauty will depend on the system. For Schelling, the 

beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature because the Absolute is 

the paradigm for understanding reality; the evolution of the Absolute 

first goes through the phase of nature, then through the phase of art, 

which is a higher phase than the previous one because in the phase of 

art finitude is united with infinity that is still absent in nature. In this 

conception, the beauty of nature is accidental and the beauty of art is 

essential. Hegel precluded the beauty of nature and thought that only art 

can be beautiful. This was because nature in the process of the dialecti-

cal development of the Absolute is the negation of the Spirit, and beau-

ty is born from the spirit and reborn for the sake of the spirit. In both 

cases, both beauty and nature are interpreted exclusively in the catego-

ries of the philosophical system. 

Nature can be treated as a correlate of the particular sciences, 

such as physics, chemistry, or biology. Then the treatment of nature in 

realistic and common-sense categories is regarded as an expression of 

naivety and subjectivism. The beauty of nature is only an effect of our 

subjective impressions under which lies a “cold” and “indifferent” 

world of the components of matter invisible to the naked eye. 

Nature can also be regarded as a necessary, but in itself worth-

less, basis for aesthetic objects that appear due to art. In fact, what is 

beautiful is an aesthetic object that results from activities of an artist 

whose work is appropriately interpreted by the recipient (Ingarden). 

The aesthetic conceptions of beauty refer to acts of knowledge, 

to emotional states, or to the aesthetic object constituted on the basis of 

a work of art. According to the founder of aesthetics—Baumgarten, 



Piotr Jaroszyński 588 

beauty is a perfection of sensory knowledge,
15

 which in the system built 

on the principles of G. W. Leibniz meant a vague representation of per-

fection. Baumgarten was followed by Georg F. Meier, Moses Mendels-

sohn, Johann A. Eberhard, and Johann G. Sulzer who emphasized rep-

resentation more than knowledge. The British philosophers, aside from 

knowledge (mainly sensory knowledge), expounded on the role of emo-

tions. Joseph Addison held that beauty evokes in us a secret joy and 

appeals directly to the imagination. In turn, Francis Hutcheson connect-

ed beauty with pleasure, that is, with that which comes from knowledge 

of complex ideas. David Hume returned to the classical theory of har-

mony; following in the tracks of Plotinus, Edmund Burke criticized that 

theory. Henry Home limited beauty to the sense of sight, even eliminat-

ing hearing. 

The Kantian theory of beauty rose above the line of thought of 

Baumgarten and of British aesthetics and was an integral part of tran-

scendental philosophy. Beauty is delight that flows from the free play 

of the imagination with the intellect, and also from form, but not from 

the matter of the object; that delight is indifferent to existence (disinter-

ested joy)—that is purposefulness without a purpose or end (unreflected 

knowledge). Kant’s conception, especially his category of play, was 

referred to by Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Karl Groos, and Jean-

Marie Guyau. 

Under the influence of Hegel, the conception of beauty as ex-

pression was developed, especially as the expression of the artist who 

expresses himself in art. According to abstract idealism, beauty is main-

ly a property of ideas, and only in addition is it a property of matter 

(Karl C. F. Krause, Karl W. F. Solger, Christian H. Weisse, Hermann 

Lotze), but according to concrete idealism, a connection with matter is 

necessary (Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher, Martin Deutinger, Friedrich 

                                                
15 Aesthetica (Hildesheim 1986), I, 14: “[P]erfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis.” 



Beauty 

 

589 

 

T. Vischer, Eduard von Hartmann). Beauty is described as a perfectly 

expressed ideal (Louis A. Reid), as an expression of aesthetic feelings 

(Samuel Alexander), or as an expression of the artist’s internal life 

(Henry Osborne). Beauty is a signifying form expressed by the senses 

(Susanne Langer, Ernst Cassirer). 

Benedetto Croce’s theory was also inspired by Hegelianism. 

Croce held that beauty was the most primary form of intuition or ex-

pression that flows through human life; it is a synthesis of feelings and 

knowledge, especially the imagination; it is indifferent to reality and is 

part of the aesthetic synthesis that precedes logical synthesis and practi-

cal synthesis. In such a source-related and primary experience, the 

French phenomenologist, Mikel Dufrenne, also looked for beauty.
16

 

A typical feature of the theories of beauty proposed in aesthetics 

is that beauty is separated from reality and from man’s higher personal 

acts; beauty is treated mainly as a correlate or property of sensory-

emotional acts that have a pre-intellectual and pre-reflective character.
17

 

The Problem of Ugliness 

Ugliness must be considered both in the context of the concep-

tion of beauty, since it is its negation, and in the conception of being. At 

the level of objective definition, ugliness can be the negation of harmo-

ny as disharmony, the negation of light as darkness, the negation of 

perfection as imperfection. From the metaphysical point of view (the 

analogical conception of being), ugliness is a lack that ultimately pre-

supposes the positively understood basis (subject) in which it appears. 

There is neither positively nor absolutely understood ugliness. Being as 

such is beautiful in the transcendental sense, because as such it presup-

                                                
16 Esthétique et philosophie, vol. 1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1967), 139–160. 
17 Cf. Piotr Jaroszyński, Beauty and Being (Toronto: PIMS, 2011), 57–155. 



Piotr Jaroszyński 590 

poses a commensurate subordination to the Absolute’s love and knowl-

edge. 

In the univocal conception of being, ugliness cannot be treated as 

a privation of being, but as something in itself that is called ugliness 

because it does not possess a feature essential to beauty (the good). 

In neo-Platonism, diffusion is a feature of the good (emanation-

ism), while evil is a property of matter; matter is the final stage of ema-

nation and thereby it no longer imparts itself and must be ugly (Ploti-

nus). 

At the level of the relationist definition, ugliness means either 

cognitive vagueness or the evocation of negative emotions (disgust, 

revulsion). Being as such exists only due to actual ordering to the Abso-

lute’s love and knowledge, and thereby in a metaphysical sense, being 

cannot be ugly. 

In the case of a being’s relation to human love and knowledge, 

we can speak only of its potential subordination, which means its open-

ness both in the aspect of intelligibility and loveability, which do not 

need to be realized in actuality. 

The problem of ugliness in the aesthetic sense concerns above all 

ugliness as the topic of works of art where the artist’s intention is to 

show something that is disharmonious, deformed, dark, and which 

arouses negative emotions. In that case, the measure of perfection must 

include the relation of the work of art to the artistic conception that is 

the exemplary idea and the measure of perfection, and not in relation to 

the world that is represented. The second aspect concerns the manner of 

representation, which can be perfect with respect to the author’s talent. 

Then a phenomenon appears of which Thomas Aquinas spoke: we call 

an image beautiful when it perfectly represents a thing, although the 

thing is ugly in itself. Perfect representation includes artistic skill, 

which makes pleasing to us that which in relation to reality may have 

shortcomings and may arouse negative emotions, but a feeling of satis-



Beauty 

 

591 

 

faction rules over those emotions because the work of art revolves di-

rectly in the realm of the world that is represented (art as an intentional 

being). 

The philosophical analysis of beauty, that considers beauty as a 

property of being, allows us to investigate and separate beauty as a cul-

tural and historical phenomenon. It explains why there is no room for 

transcendental beauty in some kinds of metaphysics (ontology), why 

the crisis of beauty arises in ethics (by the breaking of contact with real-

ity), and what vision of being is presupposed in cultural currents that 

promote anti-kallism. 

Just as beauty from the objective side highlights the harmony and 

order of reality, so from the side of the human subject, especially per-

sonal life, which encompasses what we call culture, and what contains 

within it human knowledge (including science), moral conduct, produc-

tivity, and religion, beauty is the keystone that in the dynamic of our 

development brings order and opens us to ultimate fulfillment, which in 

the supernatural perspective takes the form of the visio beatifica (the 

vision of God, which causes happiness), which engages all man’s spir-

itual faculties in their entirety in the highest degree. On this account, 

beauty is a crucial category for culture in general because it integrates 

various lines of our personal life, and it cannot in any case be reduced 

merely to aesthetics (art) or lost from the field of vision of human life 

as integrally and transcendentally understood. 

 

 

 
 

 
BEAUTY IN THE UNIVERSAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY 

SUMMARY 

The author considers the problem of beauty. He identifies beauty as an analogically 
understood property of reality, of human products (including art), and of the human 



Piotr Jaroszyński 592 

mode of conduct, and as that which, in the tradition of Western culture, is expressed 
under the form of harmony, perfection, or splendor, which as beheld and for beholding 
arouses complacency or pleasure. The article discusses the following topics: classical 
theories of beauty, beauty in the metaphysical conception, beauty in aesthetics, the 
separation of beauty from reality, and the problem of ugliness. 

KEYWORDS 

beauty, reality, morality, art, human being, Western culture, harmony, perfection, 
splendor, complacency, pleasure, metaphysics, aesthetics, ugliness, Universal Encyclo-

pedia of Philosophy. 

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