About Beauty

Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure in himself would find the ground give way beneath him.

–Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889

Contemporary Americans talk about the things they find beautiful, because they talk about them all the time, and when they do, they use the word ‘beautiful’ with consistency and precision in a very traditional way that dates back to the Renaissance and beyond that to Latin Antiquity. In this vernacular usage, the word ‘beautiful’ bears no metaphysical burden. It signifies our anxious pleasure at something that transcends the merely appropriate and asserts the relative value of that thing over other things of its kind. In everyday talk, the word usually occurs as an exclamation occasioned by the speaker’s involuntary positive response to an object or event in the external world, and, more often than not, these vocalizations are followed by conversation, by analysis and negotiation, agreement or dissent, coalition or faction. Herein lies the mystery. more

What Is Beauty, Anyway? by De Clarke

What is Beauty? Audio recording with Alexander Nehamas, Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University

A Test Making some observations on ... What is "beauty