Beauty (Kallos, to kalon / Pulchrum) — The quality that arouses pleasure, admiration, or approval in contemplation, and a central object of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The Greek term to kalon covers not only sensible beauty but also what is noble or excellent, binding the aesthetic and the moral together. In Plato, especially in the Symposium, beauty is a reflection of the Idea of Beauty in the sensible world: the soul, awakened by love (eros), ascends from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls and finally to Beauty itself (auto to kalon), eternal and unchanging. Plotinus, in the Enneads, sees beauty as the radiance of form ordering matter, an emanation of the One. In scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas fixes three conditions of beauty: integrity (integritas), proportion or harmony (proportio), and clarity or splendor (claritas). The modern turn comes with Kant, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790): the beautiful provokes a disinterested pleasure — independent of desire or concept — and claims a subjective universal validity, thus distinguishing itself both from the agreeable (merely private) and from the sublime, which exceeds the imagination and points to the grandeur of reason. Hegel, in turn, defines artistic beauty as the “sensuous shining of the Idea,” the concrete manifestation of spirit in the work. The concept therefore connects with neighboring notions such as the sublime and taste, and runs through the tension between an objective beauty grounded in proportion and a beauty grounded in the judgment of the subject.
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