The concept of beauty in anthropology - Essay Example

Due to this it is considered a great challenge to find a uniform definition of beauty because what a person finds beautiful is not the same as another. Beauty is based on personal perspective and own concepts honed by own culture and society. It is a universal word but has many definitions and meaning. Scrotun (1) cited the idea of Pato and Plotinus that beauty is an ultimate value ­­–something that people pursue for its own sake and for the pursuit of which no further reason is needed to be given.

As Santayan stated beauty is truth, the expression of the ideal, the symbol of divine perfection and the sensible manifestation of the good. According to Scruton (5) beauty pleases us, it is always a reason for attending to the thing that possesses it, and it is a subject-matter of judgement: the judgement of taste where it is all about beautiful objects not the subject’s statement of mind. Beauty is always associated with aesthetics and is always associated with arts. Stout as cited by Van Damme (40) defined aesthetic as a branch of philosophy dealing with the beautiful and the tests by which the beautiful may be judged.

Beauty can be found in different works of art. Paintings on the wall that give joy to the audience; sculptures that please the eye and resonate the beauty that can be touched; and other works of art that are considered as important possessions because of beauty. According to Santayana (126), our judgment of aesthetic is intrinsic when based on the perception of beauty and based on the character of immediate experience and never consciously on the idea of eventual utilities of the object. Judgements about moral worth, on the contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the consciousness probably involved.

However, in Africa, art forms are made to illustrate ugliness (Van Damme 41). This is the definition by the word anti-aesthetic introduced by R. Thomson