Is There a Universal Definition of Beauty?

The question arises of whether beauty is universal. Suppose you agree that Michelangelo’s “David” and a Van Gogh self-portrait are beautiful: do such beauties have something in common? Is there a single shared quality, beauty, that we experience in both of them? And is this beauty the very same that one experiences when gazing at the Grand Canyon from its edge or listening to Beethoven’s ninth symphony?

If beauty is universal, as for example, Plato maintained, it is reasonable to hold that we do not know it through the senses. Indeed, the subjects in question are quite different and are also known in different ways (gaze, hearing, observation). If there is something in common among those subjects, it cannot be what is known through the senses.

But, is there really something common to all experiences of beauty? Compare the beauty of an oil painting with that of picking flowers in a Montana field over the summer or surfing a gigantic wave in Hawaii. It seems that these cases have no single common element: not even the feelings or the basic ideas involved seem to match. Similarly, people around the world find different music, visual art, performance, and physical attributes to be beautiful. It’s on the basis of those considerations that many believe that beauty is a label we attach to different sorts of experiences based on a combination of cultural and personal preferences.