128-485: Natural Beauty may refer to: The general concept of beauty Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty , a designated geographic area in some British countries Physical attractiveness "Natural Beauty", 1992 song by Neil Young from the album Harvest Moon Natural Beauty (novel) , 2023 novel by Ling Ling Huang Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with
256-587: A chargé d'affaires in Paris, writing "despatches to the British Secretary of State ". He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh... to correct and qualify so much lusciousness." Upon returning to Britain in 1766, Hume wrote a letter to Lord Hertford after being asked to by George Colebrooke ; the letter informed Lord Hertford that he had an opportunity to invest in one of Colebrooke's slave plantations in
384-468: A normative conclusion of what ought to be done. Hume denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a bundle of sensations , and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion , including his rejection of miracles, and of
512-555: A "classical beauty" or said to possess a "classical beauty", whilst the foundations laid by Greek and Roman artists have also supplied the standard for male beauty and female beauty in western civilization as seen, for example, in the Winged Victory of Samothrace . During the Gothic era, the classical aesthetical canon of beauty was rejected as sinful. Later, Renaissance and Humanist thinkers rejected this view, and considered beauty to be
640-504: A "simple Roman tomb", requesting in his will that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest". David Hume died at the southwest corner of St. Andrew's Square in Edinburgh's New Town , at what is now 21 Saint David Street. A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence and with the help of coincidence, suggests that
768-513: A coldness—which he attributed to a "Laziness of Temper"—that lasted about nine months. Scurvy spots later broke out on his fingers, persuading Hume's physician to diagnose him with the "Disease of the Learned". Hume wrote that he "went under a Course of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills", taken along with a pint of claret every day. He also decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning. His health improved somewhat, but in 1731, he
896-446: A fact that may subconsciously condition males choosing mates. In 2008, other commentators have suggested that this preference may not be universal. For instance, in some non-Western cultures in which women have to do work such as finding food, men tend to have preferences for higher waist-hip ratios. Exposure to the thin ideal in mass media, such as fashion magazines, directly correlates with body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and
1024-417: A general definition of beauty and several authors take the opposite claim that such laws cannot be formulated, as part of their definition of beauty. A very common element in many conceptions of beauty is its relation to pleasure . Hedonism makes this relation part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful
1152-507: A great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked." Classical philosophy and sculptures of men and women produced according to the Greek philosophers ' tenets of ideal human beauty were rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, leading to a re-adoption of what became known as a "classical ideal". In terms of female human beauty, a woman whose appearance conforms to these tenets is still called
1280-489: A harmonious interplay between the faculties of understanding and imagination. A further question for hedonists is how to explain the relation between beauty and pleasure. This problem is akin to the Euthyphro dilemma : is something beautiful because we enjoy it or do we enjoy it because it is beautiful? Identity theorists solve this problem by denying that there is a difference between beauty and pleasure: they identify beauty, or
1408-417: A hot pan's handle is more forceful than simply thinking about touching a hot pan. According to Hume, impressions are meant to be the original form of all our ideas. From this, Don Garrett (2002) has coined the term copy principle, referring to Hume's doctrine that all ideas are ultimately copied from some original impression, whether it be a passion or sensation, from which they derive. After establishing
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#17328691162621536-414: A moment ... but the sheer agreeableness of animal faith will protect us from excessive caution and sterile suspension of belief. Others, such as Charles Sanders Peirce , have demurred from Hume's solution, while some, such as Kant and Karl Popper , have thought that Hume's analysis has "posed a most fundamental challenge to all human knowledge claims". The notion of causation is closely linked to
1664-491: A necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude toward them or of their function. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics , one of the major branches of philosophy. Beauty is usually categorized as an aesthetic property besides other properties, like grace, elegance or
1792-606: A person experiences a variety of taste-sensations, tactile-sensations, and smell-sensations when biting into an apple, with the overall sensation—again, a complex impression. Thinking about an apple allows a person to form complex ideas, which are made of similar parts as the complex impressions they were developed from, but which are also less forceful. Hume believes that complex perceptions can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts until perceptions are reached that have no parts of their own, and these perceptions are thus referred to as simple. Regardless of how boundless it may seem;
1920-422: A person's imagination is confined to the mind's ability to recombine the information it has already acquired from the body's sensory experience (the ideas that have been derived from impressions). In addition, "as our imagination takes our most basic ideas and leads us to form new ones, it is directed by three principles of association, namely, resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect": Hume elaborates more on
2048-697: A personal level, the Marquess found Hume's dietary tendencies to be bizarre. Hume then started his great historical work, The History of England , which took fifteen years and ran to over a million words. During this time, he was also involved with the Canongate Theatre through his friend John Home , a preacher. In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as secretary to General James St Clair , who
2176-547: A process akin to a category mistake , one treats one's subjective pleasure as an objective property of the beautiful thing. Other conceptions include defining beauty in terms of a loving or longing attitude toward the beautiful object or in terms of its usefulness or function. In 1871, functionalist Charles Darwin explained beauty as result of accumulative sexual selection in "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex". The classical Greek noun that best translates to
2304-524: A rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty is " unity in variety and variety in unity". He wrote that beauty was neither purely subjective nor purely objective—it could be understood not as "any Quality suppos'd to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes
2432-561: A scholar of 18th-century literature, judged it a "remarkable autobiography, even though it may lack the usual attractions of that genre. Anyone hankering for startling revelations or amusing anecdotes had better look elsewhere." Despite condemning vanity as a dangerous passion, in his autobiography Hume confesses his belief that the "love of literary fame" had served as his "ruling passion" in life, and claims that this desire "never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments". One such disappointment Hume discusses in this account
2560-424: A thing designed according to some principle and fitted for a purpose. He distinguished "free beauty" from "merely adherent beauty", explaining that "the first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith." By this definition, free beauty is found in seashells and wordless music; adherent beauty in buildings and
2688-431: A thing in itself. The ascent of love begins with one's own body, then secondarily, in appreciating beauty in another's body, thirdly beauty in the soul, which cognates to beauty in the mind in the modern sense, fourthly beauty in institutions, laws and activities, fifthly beauty in knowledge, the sciences, and finally to lastly love beauty itself, which translates to the original Greek language term as auto to kalon . In
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#17328691162622816-422: A variety of speculations. One prominent interpretation among contemporary Humean scholarship is that this new "scene of thought" was Hume's realisation that Francis Hutcheson 's theory of moral sense could be applied to the understanding of morality as well. From this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of 10 years reading and writing. He soon came to the verge of a mental breakdown, first starting with
2944-459: A very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early." Hume also provides an unambiguous self-assessment of the relative value of his works: that "my Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; which, in my own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best." He also wrote of his social relations: "My company
3072-453: A virtuous personality to be the greatest of beauties: In his philosophy, "a neighborhood with a ren man in it is a beautiful neighborhood." Confucius's student Zeng Shen expressed a similar idea: "few men could see the beauty in some one whom they dislike." Mencius considered "complete truthfulness" to be beauty. Zhu Xi said: "When one has strenuously implemented goodness until it is filled to completion and has accumulated truth, then
3200-430: A wide range of different standards for beauty. A strong indicator of physical beauty is " averageness ". When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the "ideal" image and are perceived as more attractive. This was first noticed in 1883, when Francis Galton overlaid photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there
3328-407: Is a mind-independent feature of things. On this account, the beauty of a landscape is independent of who perceives it or whether it is perceived at all. Disagreements may be explained by an inability to perceive this feature, sometimes referred to as a "lack of taste". Subjectivism, on the other hand, denies the mind-independent existence of beauty. Influential for the development of this position
3456-685: Is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex . This approach of localizing the processing of beauty in one brain region has received criticism within the field. Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (2004) and On Ugliness (2007). The narrator of his novel The Name of the Rose follows Aquinas in declaring: "three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason, we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light", before going on to say "the sight of
3584-455: Is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes them pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, art and taste are the main subjects of aesthetics , one of the fields of study within philosophy . As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. One difficulty in understanding beauty is that it has both objective and subjective aspects: it
3712-569: Is difficult to give a general and detailed description of what is meant by "harmony between parts" and raises the suspicion that defining beauty through harmony results in exchanging one unclear term for another one. Some attempts have been made to dissolve this suspicion by searching for laws of beauty , like the golden ratio . 18th century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten , for example, saw laws of beauty in analogy with laws of nature and believed that they could be discovered through empirical research. As of 2003, these attempts have failed to find
3840-411: Is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure. This account is sometimes labeled as "aesthetic hedonism" in order to distinguish it from other forms of hedonism . An influential articulation of this position comes from Thomas Aquinas , who treats beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it". Immanuel Kant explains this pleasure through
3968-516: Is in the initial literary reception of the Treatise , which he claims to have overcome by means of the success of the Essays : "the work was favourably received, and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment". Hume, in his own retrospective judgment, argues that his philosophical debut's apparent failure "had proceeded more from the manner than the matter". He thus suggests that "I had been guilty of
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4096-458: Is no general agreement on how "ideal observers" are to be defined, but it is usually assumed that they are experienced judges of beauty with a fully developed sense of taste. This suggests an indirect way of solving the antinomy of taste : instead of looking for necessary and sufficient conditions of beauty itself, one can learn to identify the qualities of good critics and rely on their judgments. This approach only works if unanimity among experts
4224-402: Is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was sceptical about claims to knowledge on this basis. A central doctrine of Hume's philosophy, stated in the very first lines of
4352-528: Is possible despite the fact that beauty is a mind-dependent property, dependent not on an individual but a group. A closely related theory sees beauty as a secondary or response-dependent property . On one such account, an object is beautiful "if it causes pleasure by virtue of its aesthetic properties". The problem that different people respond differently can be addressed by combining response-dependence theories with so-called ideal-observer theories : it only matters how an ideal observer would respond. There
4480-412: Is seen as a property of things but also as depending on the emotional response of observers. Because of its subjective side, beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder". It has been argued that the ability on the side of the subject needed to perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as the "sense of taste", can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. This suggests
4608-451: Is something in the cause that necessarily produces its effect is because our past experiences have habituated us to think in this way. Continuing this idea, Hume argues that "only in the pure realm of ideas, logic, and mathematics, not contingent on the direct sense awareness of reality, [can] causation safely…be applied—all other sciences are reduced to probability". He uses this scepticism to reject metaphysics and many theological views on
4736-484: Is sometimes discussed under the label " antinomy of taste". It has prompted various philosophers to seek a unified theory that can take all these intuitions into account. One promising route to solve this problem is to move from subjective to intersubjective theories , which hold that the standards of validity of judgments of taste are intersubjective or dependent on a group of judges rather than objective. This approach tries to explain how genuine disagreement about beauty
4864-581: Is that between adherent beauty ( pulchritudo adhaerens ) and free beauty ( pulchritudo vaga ). A thing has adherent beauty if its beauty depends on the conception or function of this thing, unlike free or absolute beauty. Examples of adherent beauty include an ox which is beautiful as an ox but not beautiful as a horse or a photograph which is beautiful, because it depicts a beautiful building but that lacks beauty generally speaking because of its low quality. Judgments of beauty seem to occupy an intermediary position between objective judgments, e.g. concerning
4992-447: Is that judgments of beauty seem to be based on subjective grounds, namely our feelings, while claiming universal correctness at the same time. This tension is sometimes referred to as the "antinomy of taste". Adherents of both sides have suggested that a certain faculty, commonly called a sense of taste , is necessary for making reliable judgments about beauty. David Hume , for example, suggests that this faculty can be trained and that
5120-438: Is to argue that, rather than reason, natural instinct explains the human practice of making inductive inferences. He asserts that "Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable [ sic ] necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel." In 1985, and in agreement with Hume, John D. Kenyon writes: Reason might manage to raise a doubt about the truth of a conclusion of natural inductive inference just for
5248-480: Is true for all cases. For example, a cold jaded critic may still be a good judge of beauty because of her years of experience but lack the joy that initially accompanied her work. One way to avoid this objection is to allow responses to beautiful things to lack pleasure while insisting that all beautiful things merit pleasure, that aesthetic pleasure is the only appropriate response to them. G. E. Moore explained beauty in regard to intrinsic value as "that of which
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5376-495: The Treatise of Human Nature , is that the mind consists of perceptions, or the mental objects which are present to it, and which divide into two categories: "All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas ." Hume believed that it would "not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction", which commentators have generally taken to mean
5504-467: The Perception of some mind; ... however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception." Immanuel Kant believed that there could be no "universal criterion of the beautiful" and that the experience of beauty is subjective, but that an object is judged to be beautiful when it seems to display "purposiveness"; that is, when its form is perceived to have the character of
5632-632: The Philosophical Essays , which were decidedly anti-religious. This represented a turning point in his career and the various opportunities made available to him. Even Adam Smith , his personal friend who had vacated the Glasgow philosophy chair, was against his appointment out of concern that public opinion would be against it. In 1761, all his works were banned on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum . Hume returned to Edinburgh in 1751. In
5760-534: The Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, critics in Great Britain at the time described it as "abstract and unintelligible". As Hume had spent most of his savings during those four years, he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply [his] deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired [his] independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except
5888-478: The Treatise . Though he was only 23 years old when starting this work, it is now regarded as one of the most important in the history of Western philosophy . Hume worked for four years on his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature , subtitled "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects", completing it in 1738 at age 28. Although many scholars today consider
6016-490: The University of Edinburgh at an unusually early age—either 12 or possibly as young as 10—at a time when 14 was the typical age. Initially, Hume considered a career in law , because of his family. However, in his words, he came to have: ...an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius , Cicero and Virgil were
6144-557: The West Indies , though Hertford ultimately decided not to do so. In June of that year, Hume facilitated the purchase of a slave plantation in Martinique on behalf of his friend, the wine merchant John Stewart, by writing to the colony's governor Victor-Thérèse Charpentier . According to Felix Waldmann, a former Hume Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Hume's "puckish scepticism about
6272-579: The absence of genetic or acquired defects . Since the 1970s there has been increasing evidence that a preference for beautiful faces emerges early in infancy, and is probably innate, and that the rules by which attractiveness is established are similar across different genders and cultures. A feature of beautiful women which has been explored by researchers is a waist–hip ratio of approximately 0.70. As of 2004, physiologists had shown that women with hourglass figures were more fertile than other women because of higher levels of certain female hormones,
6400-401: The argument from design for God's existence, were especially controversial for their time. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism , logical positivism , the philosophy of science , early analytic philosophy , cognitive science , theology , and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers." Hume
6528-407: The sublime . As a positive aesthetic value, beauty is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Beauty is often listed as one of the three fundamental concepts of human understanding besides truth and goodness . Objectivists or realists see beauty as an objective or mind-independent feature of beautiful things, which is denied by subjectivists . The source of this debate
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#17328691162626656-455: The " constant conjunction " of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience. An opponent of philosophical rationalists , Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that " Reason is, and ought only to be
6784-464: The 1750s, it was necessary for his friends to avert a trial against him on the charge of heresy , specifically in an ecclesiastical court. However, he "would not have come and could not be forced to attend if he said he was not a member of the Established Church". Hume failed to gain the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. By this time, he had published
6912-605: The Authors which I was secretly devouring. He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735 that "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books". He did not graduate. At around age 18, Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene of Thought", inspiring him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it". As he did not recount what this scene exactly was, commentators have offered
7040-632: The Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist. In 1745, during the Jacobite risings , Hume tutored the Marquess of Annandale , an engagement that ended in disarray after about a year. The Marquess could not follow with Hume's lectures, his father saw little need for philosophy, and on
7168-535: The English-language words "beauty" or "beautiful" was κάλλος , kallos , and the adjective was καλός, kalos . This is also translated as "good" or "of fine quality" and thus has a broader meaning than mere physical or material beauty. Similarly, kallos was used differently from the English word beauty in that it first and foremost applied to humans and bears an erotic connotation. The Koine Greek word for beautiful
7296-466: The Idea ( Form ) above all other Ideas. Platonic thought synthesized beauty with the divine . Scruton (cited: Konstan) states Plato states of the idea of beauty, of it (the idea), being something inviting desirousness (c.f seducing ), and, promotes an intellectual renunciation (c.f. denouncing ) of desire. For Alexander Nehamas , it is only the locating of desire to which the sense of beauty exists, in
7424-497: The PQD is strongly present in the object. Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is related to justice. Beauty is also studied by psychologists and neuroscientists in the field of experimental aesthetics and neuroesthetics respectively. Psychological theories see beauty as a form of pleasure . Correlational findings support the view that more beautiful objects are also more pleasing. Some studies suggest that higher experienced beauty
7552-421: The admiring contemplation is good in itself". This definition connects beauty to experience while managing to avoid some of the problems usually associated with subjectivist positions since it allows that things may be beautiful even if they are never experienced. Another subjectivist theory of beauty comes from George Santayana , who suggested that we project pleasure onto the things we call "beautiful". So in
7680-476: The appearance of it, with the experience of aesthetic pleasure. Hedonists usually restrict and specify the notion of pleasure in various ways in order to avoid obvious counterexamples. One important distinction in this context is the difference between pure and mixed pleasure . Pure pleasure excludes any form of pain or unpleasant feeling while the experience of mixed pleasure can include unpleasant elements. But beauty can involve mixed pleasure, for example, in
7808-541: The basis that they are not grounded in fact and observations, and are therefore beyond the reach of human understanding. The cornerstone of Hume's epistemology is the problem of induction . This may be the area of Hume's thought where his scepticism about human powers of reason is most pronounced. The problem revolves around the plausibility of inductive reasoning , that is, reasoning from the observed behaviour of objects to their behaviour when unobserved. As Hume wrote, induction concerns how things behave when they go "beyond
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#17328691162627936-467: The beautiful implies peace". Mike Phillips has described Umberto Eco's On Beauty as "incoherent" and criticized him for focusing only on Western European history and devoting none of his book to Eastern European, Asian, or African history. Amy Finnerty described Eco's work On Ugliness favorably. Chinese philosophy has traditionally not made a separate discipline of the philosophy of beauty. Confucius identified beauty with goodness, and considered
8064-712: The beauty will reside within it and will not depend on externals." The word "beauty" is often used as a countable noun to describe a beautiful woman. The characterization of a person as "beautiful", whether on an individual basis or by community consensus, is often based on some combination of inner beauty , which includes psychological factors such as personality , intelligence , grace , politeness , charisma , integrity , congruence and elegance , and outer beauty (i.e. physical attractiveness ) which includes physical attributes which are valued on an aesthetic basis. Standards of beauty have changed over time, based on changing cultural values. Historically, paintings show
8192-463: The boat this instant." A Treatise of Human Nature begins with the introduction: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature.… Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man." The science of man , as Hume explains, is the "only solid foundation for the other sciences" and that the method for this science requires both experience and observation as
8320-415: The case of a beautifully tragic story, which is why mixed pleasure is usually allowed in hedonist conceptions of beauty. Another problem faced by hedonist theories is that we take pleasure from many things that are not beautiful. One way to address this issue is to associate beauty with a special type of pleasure: aesthetic or disinterested pleasure . A pleasure is disinterested if it is indifferent to
8448-627: The classical standard of beauty, as sublime. The 20th century saw an increasing rejection of beauty by artists and philosophers alike, culminating in postmodernism 's anti-aesthetics. This is despite beauty being a central concern of one of postmodernism's main influences, Friedrich Nietzsche , who argued that the Will to Power was the Will to Beauty. In the aftermath of postmodernism's rejection of beauty, thinkers have returned to beauty as an important value. American analytic philosopher Guy Sircello proposed his New Theory of Beauty as an effort to reaffirm
8576-443: The concept belonged often within the discipline of mathematics. An idea of spiritual beauty emerged during the classical period , beauty was something embodying divine goodness, while the demonstration of behaviour which might be classified as beautiful, from an inner state of morality which is aligned to the good . The writing of Xenophon shows a conversation between Socrates and Aristippus . Socrates discerned differences in
8704-404: The conception of the beautiful, for example, in inanimate objects, the effectiveness of execution of design was a deciding factor on the perception of beauty in something. By the account of Xenophon, Socrates found beauty congruent with that to which was defined as the morally good, in short, he thought beauty coincident with the good . Beauty is a subject of Plato in his work Symposium . In
8832-461: The considerations of Plato. Aristotle defines beauty in Metaphysics as having order, symmetry and definiteness which the mathematical sciences exhibit to a special degree . He saw a relationship between the beautiful ( to kalon ) and virtue, arguing that "Virtue aims at the beautiful." In De Natura Deorum , Cicero wrote: "the splendour and beauty of creation", in respect to this, and all
8960-405: The cornerstones of human thought. Matters of Fact are dependent on the observer and experience. They are often not universally held to be true among multiple persons. Hume was an Empiricist, meaning he believed "causes and effects are discoverable not by reason, but by experience". He goes on to say that, even with the perspective of the past, humanity cannot dictate future events because thoughts of
9088-640: The damage to his reputation from the quarrel with Rousseau that he would author an account of the dispute, titling it "A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau ". In 1767, Hume was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department . Here, he wrote that he was given "all the secrets of the Kingdom". In 1769 he returned to James' Court in Edinburgh, where he would live from 1771 until his death in 1776. Hume's nephew and namesake, David Hume of Ninewells (1757–1838),
9216-446: The development of eating disorders among female viewers. Further, the widening gap between individual body sizes and societal ideals continues to breed anxiety among young girls as they grow, highlighting the dangerous nature of beauty standards in society. A study using Chinese immigrants and Hispanic , Black and White American citizens found that their ideals of female beauty were not significantly different. Participants in
9344-415: The distinction between feeling and thinking . Controversially, Hume, in some sense, may regard the distinction as a matter of degree, as he takes impressions to be distinguished from ideas on the basis of their force, liveliness, and vivacity—what Henry E. Allison (2008) calls the "FLV criterion." Ideas are therefore "faint" impressions. For example, experiencing the painful sensation of touching
9472-456: The end of this period Hume had attained his well-known corpulent stature; "the good table of the General and the prolonged inactive life had done their work", leaving him "a man of tremendous bulk". In 1749 he went to live with his brother in the countryside, although he continued to associate with the aforementioned Scottish Enlightenment figures. Hume's religious views were often suspect and, in
9600-483: The essay with a frank admission: I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained. Diarist and biographer James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death from a form of abdominal cancer . Hume told him that he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. Hume asked that his body be interred in
9728-428: The existence of religious miracles played a significant part in defining the critical outlook which underpins the practice of modern science." Waldmann also argued that Hume's views "served to reinforce the institution of racialised slavery in the later 18th century." In 1766, Hume left Paris to accompany Jean-Jacques Rousseau to England. Once there, he and Rousseau fell out , leaving Hume sufficiently worried about
9856-470: The existence of the beautiful object or if it did not arise owing to an antecedent desire through means-end reasoning. For example, the joy of looking at a beautiful landscape would still be valuable if it turned out that this experience was an illusion, which would not be true if this joy was due to seeing the landscape as a valuable real estate opportunity. Opponents of hedonism usually concede that many experiences of beauty are pleasurable but deny that this
9984-507: The facets of reality resulting from creation, he postulated these to be a reason to see the existence of a God as creator . In the Middle Ages , Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas included beauty among the transcendental attributes of being . In his Summa Theologica , Aquinas described the three conditions of beauty as: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony and proportion), and claritas (a radiance and clarity that makes
10112-571: The fame that he coveted. The volumes traced events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 and was a bestseller in its day. Hume was also a longtime friend of bookseller Andrew Millar , who sold Hume's History (after acquiring the rights from Scottish bookseller Gavin Hamilton ), although the relationship was sometimes complicated. Letters between them illuminate both men's interest in
10240-535: The final state, auto to kalon and truth are united as one. There is the sense in the text, concerning love and beauty they both co-exist but are still independent or, in other words, mutually exclusive, since love does not have beauty since it seeks beauty. The work toward the end provides a description of beauty in a negative sense. Plato also discusses beauty in his work Phaedrus , and identifies Alcibiades as beautiful in Parmenides . He considered beauty to be
10368-448: The following year, the Faculty of Advocates hired him to be their Librarian, a job in which he would receive little to no pay, but which nonetheless gave him "the command of a large library". This resource enabled him to continue historical research for The History of England . Hume's volume of Political Discourses , written in 1749 and published by Kincaid & Donaldson in 1752, was
10496-431: The forcefulness of impressions and ideas, these two categories are further broken down into simple and complex : "simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation", whereas "the complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts". When looking at an apple, a person experiences a variety of colour-sensations—what Hume notes as a complex impression. Similarly,
10624-532: The form of a thing apparent to the mind). In the Gothic Architecture of the High and Late Middle Ages , light was considered the most beautiful revelation of God , which was heralded in design. Examples are the stained glass of Gothic Cathedrals including Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres Cathedral . St. Augustine said of beauty "Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it
10752-425: The foundations of a logical argument. In regards to this, philosophical historian Frederick Copleston (1999) suggests that it was Hume's aim to apply to the science of man the method of experimental philosophy (the term that was current at the time to imply natural philosophy ), and that "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics ." Until recently, Hume
10880-426: The future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past". However, even though custom can serve as a guide in life, it still only represents an expectation. In other words: Experience cannot establish a necessary connection between cause and effect, because we can imagine without contradiction a case where the cause does not produce its usual effect…the reason why we mistakenly infer that there
11008-515: The human body. The Romantic poets, too, became highly concerned with the nature of beauty, with John Keats arguing in Ode on a Grecian Urn that: In the Romantic period, Edmund Burke postulated a difference between beauty in its classical meaning and the sublime . The concept of the sublime, as explicated by Burke and Kant , suggested viewing Gothic art and architecture, though not in accordance with
11136-456: The improvements of [his] talents in literature". Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote: "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country." There, in an attempt to make his larger work better known and more intelligible, he published the An Abstract of a Book lately Published as a summary of
11264-428: The last principle, explaining that, when somebody observes that one object or event consistently produces the same object or event, that results in "an expectation that a particular event (a 'cause') will be followed by another event (an 'effect') previously and constantly associated with it". Hume calls this principle custom , or habit , saying that "custom...renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for
11392-440: The main doctrines of the Treatise , without revealing its authorship. This work contained the same ideas, but with a shorter and clearer explanation. Although there has been some academic speculation as to the pamphlet's true author, it is generally regarded as Hume's creation. After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1741—included in the later edition as Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary —Hume applied for
11520-438: The mass and shape of a grapefruit, and subjective likes, e.g. concerning whether the grapefruit tastes good. Judgments of beauty differ from the former because they are based on subjective feelings rather than objective perception. But they also differ from the latter because they lay claim on universal correctness. This tension is also reflected in common language. On the one hand, we talk about beauty as an objective feature of
11648-450: The merits of the later texts alone, rather than on the more radical formulations of his early, youthful work, dismissing his philosophical debut as juvenilia : "A work which the Author had projected before he left College." Despite Hume's protestations, a consensus exists today that his most important arguments and philosophically distinctive doctrines are found in the original form they take in
11776-582: The only work he considered successful on first publication. In 1753, Hume moved from his house on Riddles Court on the Lawnmarket to a house on the Canongate at the other end of the Royal Mile . Here he lived in a tenement known as Jack's Land, immediately west of the still surviving Shoemakers Land. Eventually, with the publication of his six-volume The History of England between 1754 and 1762, Hume achieved
11904-466: The parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. On this account, which found its most explicit articulation in the Italian Renaissance , the beauty of a human body, for example, depends, among other things, on the right proportion of the different parts of the body and on the overall symmetry. One problem with this conception is that it
12032-407: The presence of beauty in universal terms, which is, as existing in a cosmological state, they observed beauty in the heavens . They saw a strong connection between mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive. The classical concept of beauty is one that exhibits perfect proportion (Wolfflin). In this context,
12160-555: The present testimony of the senses, or the records of our memory". Hume argues that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner, meaning that patterns in the behaviour of objects seem to persist into the future, and throughout the unobserved present. Hume's argument is that we cannot rationally justify the claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only two varieties—demonstrative reasoning and probable reasoning —and both of these are inadequate. With regard to demonstrative reasoning, Hume argues that
12288-493: The press." However, he found literary success in his lifetime as an essayist, and a career as a librarian at the University of Edinburgh . These successes provided him much needed income at the time. His tenure there, and the access to research materials it provided, resulted in Hume's writing the massive six-volume The History of England , which became a bestseller and the standard history of England in its day. For over 60 years, Hume
12416-470: The problem of induction. According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events. It is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. At least three interpretations of Hume's theory of causation are represented in the literature: Hume acknowledged that there are events constantly unfolding, and humanity cannot guarantee that these events are caused by prior events or are independent instances. He opposed
12544-432: The product of rational order and harmonious proportions. Renaissance artists and architects (such as Giorgio Vasari in his "Lives of Artists") criticised the Gothic period as irrational and barbarian. This point of view of Gothic art lasted until Romanticism, in the 19th century. Vasari aligned himself to the classical notion and thought of beauty as defined as arising from proportion and order. The Age of Reason saw
12672-419: The same object may produce very different ideas in distinct observers. The notion of "taste" can still be used to explain why different people disagree about what is beautiful, but there is no objectively right or wrong taste, there are just different tastes. The problem with both the objectivist and the subjectivist position in their extreme form is that each has to deny some intuitions about beauty. This issue
12800-421: The slave of the passions ." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem , or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to
12928-486: The standards of validity of judgments of beauty are intersubjective, i.e. dependent on a group of judges, rather than fully subjective or objective. Conceptions of beauty aim to capture what is essential to all beautiful things. Classical conceptions define beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. Hedonist conceptions see
13056-437: The status of beauty as an important philosophical concept. He rejected the subjectivism of Kant and sought to identify the properties inherent in an object that make it beautiful. He called qualities such as vividness, boldness, and subtlety "properties of qualitative degree" (PQDs) and stated that a PQD makes an object beautiful if it is not—and does not create the appearance of—"a property of deficiency, lack, or defect"; and if
13184-528: The street was named after Hume. His tomb stands, as he wished it, on the southwestern slope of Calton Hill , in the Old Calton Cemetery . Adam Smith later recounted Hume's amusing speculation that he might ask Charon , Hades ' ferryman, to allow him a few more years of life in order to see "the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition". The ferryman replied, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years.… Get into
13312-462: The study rated Asian and Latina women as more attractive than White and Black women , and it was found that Asian and Latina women had more of the attributes that were considered attractive for women. Exposure to Western media did not influence or improve the Asian men's ratings of White women. David Hume David Hume ( / h juː m / ; born David Home ; 7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776)
13440-618: The success of the History . In 1762 Hume moved from Jack's Land on the Canongate to James Court on the Lawnmarket . He sold the house to James Boswell in 1766. From 1763 to 1765, Hume was invited to attend Lord Hertford in Paris , where he became secretary to the British embassy in France . Hume was well received among Parisian society, and while there he met with Isaac de Pinto . In 1765, Hume served as
13568-461: The title Natural Beauty . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_Beauty&oldid=1222233830 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Beauty Beauty
13696-566: The two brothers and their sister on her own. Hume changed his family name's spelling in 1734, as the surname 'Home' (pronounced as 'Hume') was not well-known in England. Hume never married and lived partly at his Chirnside family home in Berwickshire, which had belonged to the family since the 16th century. His finances as a young man were very "slender", as his family was not rich; as a younger son he had little patrimony to live on. Hume attended
13824-491: The uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is "consistent and conceivable" that nature might stop being regular. Turning to probable reasoning, Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be uniform because it has been in the past. As this is using the very sort of reasoning (induction) that is under question, it would be circular reasoning . Thus, no form of justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences. Hume's solution to this problem
13952-498: The verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. Beauty is mainly discussed in relation to concrete objects accessible to sensory perception. It has been suggested that the beauty of a thing supervenes on the sensory features of this thing. It has also been proposed that abstract objects like stories or mathematical proofs can be beautiful. Beauty plays a central role in works of art and nature. An influential distinction among beautiful things, according to Immanuel Kant ,
14080-410: The ways in which ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences. Many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological (rather than a semantic ) reading of his project. According to this opposing view, Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it
14208-455: The widely accepted theory of causation that 'all events have a specific course or reason'. Therefore, Hume crafted his own theory of causation, formed through his empiricist and sceptic beliefs. He split causation into two realms: "All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact." Relations of Ideas are a priori and represent universal bonds between ideas that mark
14336-400: The work, the high priestess Diotima describes how beauty moves out from a core singular appreciation of the body to outer appreciations via loved ones, to the world in its state of culture and society (Wright). In other words, Diotoma gives to Socrates an explanation of how love should begin with erotic attachment , and end with the transcending of the physical to an appreciation of beauty as
14464-430: The works of early Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic period, such as Pythagoras , who conceived of beauty as useful for a moral education of the soul. He wrote of how people experience pleasure when aware of a certain type of formal situation present in reality, perceivable by sight or through the ear and discovered the underlying mathematical ratios in the harmonic scales in music. The Pythagoreans conceived of
14592-423: The world that is ascribed, for example, to landscapes, paintings or humans. The subjective side, on the other hand, is expressed in sayings like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". These two positions are often referred to as objectivism (or realism ) and subjectivism . Objectivism is the traditional view, while subjectivism developed more recently in western philosophy . Objectivists hold that beauty
14720-550: Was pulchrum ( Latin ). Beauty for ancient thinkers existed both in form , which is the material world as it is, and as embodied in the spirit, which is the world of mental formations. Greek mythology mentions Helen of Troy as the most beautiful woman. Ancient Greek architecture is based on this view of symmetry and proportion . In one fragment of Heraclitus's writings ( Fragment 106 ) he mentions beauty, this reads: "To God all things are beautiful, good, right..." The earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in
14848-423: Was John Locke 's distinction between primary qualities , which the object has independent of the observer, and secondary qualities , which constitute powers in the object to produce certain ideas in the observer. When applied to beauty, there is still a sense in which it depends on the object and its powers. But this account makes the possibility of genuine disagreements about claims of beauty implausible, since
14976-833: Was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who was best known for his highly influential system of empiricism , philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism . Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas , concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon , Thomas Hobbes , John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist. Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience
15104-794: Was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. He was a Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and rose to be Principal Clerk of Session in the Scottish High Court and Baron of the Exchequer. He is buried with his uncle in Old Calton Cemetery. In the last year of his life, Hume wrote an extremely brief autobiographical essay titled "My Own Life", summing up his entire life in "fewer than 5 pages"; it contains many interesting judgments that have been of enduring interest to subsequent readers of Hume. Donald Seibert (1984),
15232-534: Was a typical facial appearance for each. When doing this, he noticed that the composite images were more attractive as compared to any of the individual images. Researchers have replicated the result under more controlled conditions and found that the computer-generated, mathematical average of a series of faces is rated more favorably than individual faces. It is argued that it is evolutionarily advantageous that sexual creatures are attracted to mates who possess predominantly common or average features, because it suggests
15360-454: Was afflicted with a ravenous appetite and palpitations . After eating well for a time, he went from being "tall, lean and raw-bon'd" to being "sturdy, robust [and] healthful-like." Indeed, Hume would become well known for being obese and having a fondness for good port and cheese, often using them as philosophical metaphors for his conjectures. Despite having noble ancestry, Hume had no source of income and no learned profession by age 25. As
15488-501: Was born on 26 April 1711, as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh 's Lawnmarket . He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home ( née Falconer ), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick , an advocate of Ninewells . Joseph died just after David's second birthday. Catherine, who never remarried, raised
15616-596: Was common at his time, he became a merchant 's assistant, despite having to leave his native Scotland. He travelled via Bristol to La Flèche in Anjou , France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche . Hume was derailed in his attempts to start a university career by protests over his alleged " atheism ", also lamenting that his literary debut, A Treatise of Human Nature , "fell dead-born from
15744-419: Was ensured. But even experienced judges may disagree in their judgments, which threatens to undermine ideal-observer theories. Various conceptions of the essential features of beautiful things have been proposed but there is no consensus as to which is the right one. The "classical conception" (see Classicism ) defines beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts :
15872-469: Was envoy to the courts of Turin and Vienna . At that time Hume wrote Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding , later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . Often called the First Enquiry , it proved little more successful than the Treatise , perhaps because of the publication of his short autobiography My Own Life , which "made friends difficult for the first Enquiry". By
16000-460: Was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary", noting of his complex relation to religion, as well as to the state, that "though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury". He goes on to profess of his character: "My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct." Hume concludes
16128-447: Was seen as a forerunner of logical positivism , a form of anti- metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists (in summary of their verification principle ), unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e., either tautological or contradictory ), then it was meaningless. Hume, on this view, was a protopositivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate
16256-405: Was the dominant interpreter of English history. He described his "love for literary fame" as his "ruling passion" and judged his two late works, the so-called "first" and "second" enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , as his greatest literary and philosophical achievements. He would ask of his contemporaries to judge him on
16384-493: Was ὡραῖος, hōraios , an adjective etymologically coming from the word ὥρα, hōra , meaning "hour". In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with "being of one's hour". Thus, a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful. In Attic Greek, hōraios had many meanings, including "youthful" and "ripe old age". Another classical term in use to describe beauty
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