Beauty and Aesthetics

The issue of beauty is a very interesting subject. Beauty is a word that we take for granted and use all too often. We know its meaning from a very young age, but when asked to define the qualities of beauty, many people have a difficult time doing so.

In my opinion, beauty is simply a word that exists because we are humans and have instincts. As living things wired a certain way due to evolution, we have been made to like certain things because these things would ensure our survival best. We are wired to go after certain people with qualities that we find “beautiful”, for example, because these are the qualities of healthy people who are most capable of reproducing.

I hold the belief that things we find beautiful adhere to something called the Golden Ratio. That is, they are consisted of proportions that adhere to the ratio of 1:1.618. A perfect human body, as illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, has many instances of the Golden Ratio, and humans with proportions close to Golden Ratios in their proportions are those that we find the most beautiful. This appreciation for the Golden Ratio extends to the things around us beyond humans. The plants that we find beautiful adhere to the Golden Ratio in certain of their proportions, and the gadgets around us that we find beautiful or pleasing to look at are mostly designed to adhere to the Golden Ratio in their proportions.

Culture also has a role to play in our determination of beauty. From young, we are exposed to many memes which determine our preferences in life. These different memes determine how we look at the world around us and perceive things. These different perceptions give rise to different views on what beauty is.

That said, I believe that there are things that humans find universally beautiful, as we are all still humans and are very similarly wired. The perfect or ideal human body, for example, is something that many humans find beautiful, and it is something that is often explored in art. We find human bodies beautiful because it is evolutionarily advantageous—humans are social creatures, and finding humans with ideal proportions is an evolutionary advantage because it helps us befriend the healthy and mate with the healthy to ensure that our lineage continues.