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Societal concept of beauty
Beauty in society
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Societal concept of beauty
Beauty in society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Societal concept of beauty
What is the definition of beauty? Webster’s dictionary says “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses”, but to some people true beauty comes in fire. Such is it with the society seen in Fahrenheit 451. As Shown during the course of the novel the differences of character, acts, and opinions between Montag and Captain Beatty burn brighter that the kerosene drenched houses at night.
Realistically as a people we construct good from knowing what is bad. As Berger eloquently put it in “Ways of Seeing”, we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relationship between things and ourselves (p.270). This is to say that in it is hard to create an explanation of a subject, such as, what is beauty unless one compares and contrasts it to what it is not. Unlike many of the past generations, teenagers now are suffering from low self-esteem and depression, due to the media and how it chooses to represent people. The media is run like a dictatorship with a hierarchy.
Beauty can be found almost anywhere. But what does it mean? You can see it in artwork and hear it through music. A certain talent or creation can be beautiful also. Webster’s dictionary states the definition of beauty as being “the qualities in a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or the mind,” therefore, people usually associate beauty to someone’s physical appearance.
Beauty Beauty can be a term to describe a person’s appearance. “You look beautiful today”, or “That person is beautiful”, are examples of how people may say the word beauty. Beauty can also describe an object or a place, like “The view up here is amazing and beautiful”. Society may define beauty as the physical attractiveness of a person, especially on women. On the other hand, I define it as the beauty within a person, which means beauty that cannot be seen.
The dictionary presents the definition of beauty as a combination of qualities such as shape, color, or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Beauty is actually perceived differently by every person; many people perceive beauty as the way one looks, but many others associate beauty with how a person acts and treats other people. This quote from Plato states that, “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”. This quote means that not one person has the exact same idea of what beauty is.
Beauty is not just what someone sees, but beauty is anything that is appealing to oneself. Today’s society has made beauty into this unappealing idea, such as if you do not look a particular way you are not thought to be beautiful. Beauty is so much more than what is appealing to the eye. Beauty is also very appealing to the mind, the body, as well as the spirit. Beauty can be one’s looks, personality, or even habits, which also can have different forms.
Beauty defines an individual and appeals to the eyes of others. Beauty comes in 2 forms. Everybody has heard the saying that a person's beauty reflects on the inside and out. Some think that beauty comes from how a person carries themselves or how they look physically. Some may even believe that beauty comes from the way a person thinks.
We grow up being told that beauty is the eye of the beholder. Everyone has their own opinion of what is beautiful and what isn’t. But we are all still confronted with beauty on a daily basis and still obsess over it day after day. Why do we care so much about beauty? What is that makes something more beautiful than something else?
To this culture, beauty is just something that is pleasurable or satisfies the moment. On Wikipedia, it says beauty’s modern definition is, “A characteristic of an animal, idea, object, person or place that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction”. And that’s what I thought to. But this first article helped me realize Beauty is characteristics of God, like for a small range of examples; excellency, complexity, purity, or admirable. I think that blew my mind just a little bit.
If you search in a dictionary or google the definition for beauty, it would say “a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.” The definition gives beauty a mediocre meaning, and it can never do this word justice. Each and individual has his or her own perception and taste in what is beautiful. It can be an emotion, an object, a human, a place, a scene, a thought and absolutely anything. Like beauty, the word everything is defined in simple words, that are “all things”, but it is in all existing materials and the abstract.
Death is not only an end to one’s life, but a new beginning to their afterlife. The new start in the afterlife shows that everyone has a chance to share their dreams with others. “X. I Died for Beauty” by Emily Dickinson, represents not only how one dies for what they believe in, but the courage to strive for goals and how the secrets they have, die with them. Unfulfilled goals don’t just end after one is deceased, but lives on to share with others in the afterlife, even when the goal is misrepresented. Relinquishing hope towards a “scarce” dream, “d[ying] for beauty”, others often “lain” the goal as something far from the “truth.”
According to Kant however, this is impossible as the judgment of beauty is not a science. Calling an object beautiful is like saying, the object makes me feel happy, uncomfort-able, nostalgic, frightened and so on. It is an announcement of a personal emotion rendered in reaction to the object. For example, an image of a child holding a gun may disturb me, due to connotations that the two things together hold (death, corruption of innocence, child sol-diers). These connotations however are deeply societal and reflect my experience of objects, imagery and their associations.
In 1.6 of Enneads, On Beauty, by Plotinus discusses the common questions surrounding beauty. Such as, what is it? Why are we, as humans drawn to it? Why are some things thought to be beautiful while some are not? And, how do we know when we see beauty, or something ugly?
Beauty is defined as a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588: “Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.” Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote: “Beauty, like supreme dominion Is but supported by opinion.” David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include: "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." These phrases show that the idiom Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder is somewhat true, but does not answer why women do so much to be considered beautiful.
Why Philosophical Ignorance Isn’t Bliss To each his own; different strokes for different folks; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All three of these phrases, common adages in society, serve to underscore the diversity of tastes amongst people, whether our preference is for ice cream over cake, black over gray, or cats over dogs. However, the last statement, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” an explicitly post-modernist belief, does more than seemingly state the obvious. Rather, it declares the much deeper viewpoint that individuals dictate in their own terms what beauty is rather than recognizing beauty as an intrinsic quality. But do all who use this phrase view beauty in this light and believe this phrase to mean the same thing?