Charles Baudelaire — Modernizing Beauty

Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,
O Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin,
Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime,
Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin.

Did you fall from high heaven or surge from the abyss,
O Beauty? Your bright gaze, infernal and divine,
Confusedly pours out courage and cowardice,
Or love and crime. In this one can compare you to wine.

What is beauty?

Is it found in the virtuous, in the heroic? Is it hidden deep down within the work of art? Is it found in nature, in the human form? Is it found in love, or joy, or melancholy?

We are all, in some sense, in daily contact with beauty. We probably think we know what is beautiful and what isn’t.

We think there is a common thread that unites all things beautiful, and that relates our subjective experience of it to a more general, objective property of things, people, places.

But when we have to put our finger on what beauty is, things get tricky. It seems to be rather a lot like the problem of defining words in one of Wittgenstein‘s language games: we use beauty in an idosyncratic, operational way, and we kind of know what it means within our way of living. But when pressed hard we are literally hardpressed to find a general, objective definition of the term.

Philosophers have ground their teeth for ages on exploring and understanding what beauty is. This question constitutes one of the…