What is the Difference Between Beauty and Aesthetics?

When speaking of beauty and aesthetics in the same breath, it is a powerful association of the senses that decides and determines what constitutes these two factors that give joy and pleasure to the human eye. Often people use these terms interchangeably to describe that quality of life that delights the mind or senses and is associated with true balance and harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, integrity, creativity and sheer originality.

Defining Beauty

While poets and philosophers declare that beauty is subjective and lies in the eye of the beholder and can be anything that brings pleasure to the mind and soul, scientists and socialists claim that beauty is an amalgamation of certain properties like contemplation, personal connectivity, symmetry and cultural standards etc.

Thomas Aquinas, echoing the theory of Aristotle, made a statement in this regard that beautiful things are those that please when seen. This can be understood in the inter-subjective context of beauty and aesthetics being a matter of perception and individual experience defining the perception. Perception, in this concept, applied to beauty possessing three basic components, namely, the Objective, (combining unity, order and harmony of the beautiful), the Relative, (significant situation in which the thing is viewed) and the Subjective, or inner mental state of the perceiver. Thomas Aquinas believed that beauty is an attribute of goodness and is a result of health, energy, virtue, knowledge and natural order.

Defining Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of art and the criteria of artistic judgment. Plato formulated the classical conception of art as being an imitation of nature. This was based on an idea originally propagated by Plato and developed by Aristotle in his Poetics. Modern thinkers like Kant, F. W. Schelling, Benedetto Croce and Ernst Cassirer have stressed on the two major aspects of what constitute aesthetics, namely the creative and symbolic aspects of art. Aesthetics is concerned with the nature of all things beautiful and can have either an objective approach or a subjective one. The former approach emphasizes that beauty is inherent in an object and judgments about it possibly have objective authenticity while the second approach claims that beauty is determined by that which pleases the observer, which means it differs from person to person.

Relationship Between Beauty and Aesthetics

Aesthetics is artistic philosophy that aims at understanding the nature and meaning of beauty. While aesthetics may be the theory of beauty, it is in the broad sense, also a philosophy of art. Beauty, thus includes the sublime as well as the superficial while pure aesthetic concepts is concentrated on the philosophy of art, with careful analysis of different aspects of art like the value of aesthetic experience and the variety of aesthetic attitudes and presence of intention.

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